PREVIEW engagée #10 "Who Cares" by engagée

engagée | politisch-philosophische Einmischungen

Cares

Who ISSN 2413-4279 | 2021 / 2022 | www.engagee.org | 10 €

éengagée

Who Cares

# 10 | 2021 / 2022

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who cares

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who lives dies cares

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editorial

ho lives, who dies, who cares? When the Covid-19 pandemic struck it viciously exposed the brokenness of our care systems. While lockdowns generated a new sense of community for some, it reinforced conflicts and inequalities for many others. This issue of engagée explores both the violence and ambivalence of care, as well as the possibility to expand our imagination and build alternatives.

The pandemic has revealed once again that societies do not protect all lives equally. Similarly, it made visible the uneven distribution of care-work. Pandemic induced inequalities turn care into a question of life and death, of biopolitics and necropolitics. While numbers have become the primary mechanisms for the validation of government’s intervention, they have also been weaponised to obscure differences. Missing datasets about the number of infections and deaths by race are reinforcing existing injustices – something activists of Data for black lives are determined to challenge. With health services weakened by decades of budget cuts, attacks on the welfare state and hostility towards unions, the exploitation of care labour has intensified. Often invisible, racialized, undervalued and feminised, care work is consistently exploited by a rising number of profit-driven “care industries”. At the same time, we see women migrating to high-income economies, a process often referred to as “care drain”. This raises deeper questions about the relation between care and work, one that asks: How can

care work be properly resourced and democratically organised? As ideas of social welfare and community are pushed aside by individualist notions of “wellness”, “resilience”, and “self-improvement”, the rise of “selfcare” industries relegates care to something for sale and for personal use. Platforms like care.com, for example, seek to match gig-economy workers with those in need of care, creating “care on-demand”, while simultaneously undermining communal resources. Meanwhile, corporations spend billions on what the Care Collective terms “carewashing” to present themselves as socially responsible. Ultimately, we see that local governments invest in policing and surveillance technologies rather than social provision – putting racialized and migrant communities most at risk. The defunding of care has reinforced narrowed caring imaginaries of “care for one’s own”, such as in the context of the nuclear family or far-right movements. How can we rethink care across differences? How can demands for family and police abolition unlock new imaginaries? Against these attempts of policing and restricting care, alternative imaginaries of queer utopianism and trans-liberation have gained new traction. Yet thinking about care beyond the family is, as Sophie Silverstein explains, “less about taking away safety and cosiness than it is about extending those very same conditions to everyone regardless of how they live and love”.

If we want to understand care as a collective organising principle – something proposed by political scientist Joan Tronto – where do we start? In theoretical terms, this means restoring care at the centre of our political vocabulary, starting by recognising shared vulnerabilities and interconnectedness. In practical terms, we have to demand that we put care at the very heart of our social relationships and politics.

The third part on Care and Solidarity offers a more hopeful perspective. These contributions ask for solidarity while reminding of the paternalist, ableist, racist and sexist systems of care. Thus, the politicization of care should start where borders, prisons, care homes and other systems of repression prevent the self-determination of specific humans that are living and resisting.

From mutual aid groups to shared resources and local democracy, from “libraries of things” to time banks and skills-share sessions, from digital infrastructure that we co-own to housing as an infrastructure of care, from reproductive to climate justice, from universal health care to workers’ rights, from community care-building to practice of self-government: Who Cares?

The last section maps out Infrastructures of Care by examining the material and organizational structures of care. It starts with reflections on housing, homelessness and urban care networks and moves on to question who cleans data and the role played by healing in planning.

This tenth issue of engagée is divided in four sections. It begins with Care as Radical Politics and how caring can transform relationships. These texts promise the revolutionary potentials of care: how does a society in which every life is cherished look like?

Overall, Who Cares draws on the power and ambivalence of care and calls for the expansion of solidarity. Beyond notions of care as a quick fix to solve problems, Who Cares accounts for the grief and directs the attention towards the possibility of collective agency and emancipatory transformation.

The second part questions The Ambivalence of Care. Too often, care work is a source of anxiety and stress. The act of caring locks people into private rooms and breaks down the fragility of life. Against the attempts to capitalize on the care crisis by “building back better”, these texts critique the inconvenience, violence, and exploitation of care.

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WHO CARES

Care and Solidarity

Care as Radical Politics 6

Collages Zuzanna Czebatul

Ineinander verwoben und durcheinander verwundbar. Körperpolitiken der Sorge und Solidarität in pandemischen Zeiten Jule Govrin

An den Grenzen Europas. Fürsorgliche Solidarität als aktivistische Praxis Christin Stühlen, Jasmin Behrends & Darius Reinhardt

On Care as Collective Self-Defence Against the Punitive Logic of Security Iida Käyhkö

What is the Black Mediterranean? Interview with Ida Danewid

Care Crisis. What Caused it and How can we End it? Interview with Emma Dowling

Tod im Gefängnis – Wen kümmert‘s? Sonja John

How to Open Up the Future? On Care and Survival Amy Clark

24h Betreuer:innen in Zeiten von Corona. Gedächtnisprotokoll einer Aktivist:in Carina Maier

Care & the City – Zur kollektiven Verantwortung von Reproduktionsarbeit Johanna Reckewerth

Not your Average Kitchen. Learning from Valparaíso and Bologna Carlotta Trippa & Fernando Silva López

Who Cares if it's Human? Towards a Socialist Feminist Vision for Socially Reproductive AI Elizabeth Fetterolf

Solidarisch. Lernen. Junge Linke

A Critique of Care Politics Interview with Cristina Morini

Infrastructures of Care

The Ambivalence of Care The Excess. On Covid and Uncherished Life Flannán Delaney

Origamy Solidarity Morrigan Nihil

The Inconvenience of Care: A Manifesto Quito Tsui & Niyousha Bastani

'My Working Will Be The Work': The Temporality of Care-Work in Feminist Art from the 1970s to the Present Eleri Fowler

Rethinking Housing as an Infrastructure of Care in Violent Realities Claudia Hitzeroth & Camillo Boano

Recht auf Wohnen für alle! Obdachlosigkeit im Covid-Winter Initiative Sommerpaket

Not all Homeless are Equal. Observations on Care Disparity from the Covid-Lockdown in the UK Johannes Lenhard & Eana Meng

A Broader Public? On the UrbanDigital Nexus of Care Networks Maria Reitano

Data-Cleaning. On the Marginalisation of Digital Reproductive Labour Manischa Eichwalder

Ambivalent Healing: Notes on the Idea of Therapeutic Urban Planning in Times of Far-Right Mobilisation Gala Nettelbladt

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A Critique of Care Politics

Care has made a comeback in political discourse, though it may simply be that it is inexhaustible. In reference to your experience within the Italian feminist movement, where do you see a change in the practical as well as conceptual aspects of care? It’s a very complex matter. From a theoretical viewpoint, women have always questioned the concept of care, with which they’ve nurtured a “complex alliance”. Feminism of Marxist and materialist origins, especially in Italy through the seventies, has shed light on the occultation of domestic and care work, on the broken link between the conditions and material contradictions women found themselves living in, including the cultural conditioning they endured. The demand for the compensation of reproductive labour initiated by leading members of Lotta Femminista who sought to link emotional aspects together with collective action and, ultimately, capital, is well known. In 1982, Laura Balbo coined the term service work in an attempt to give value to the part it plays in mediating between needs and affects and resources determined by the logic of profit. The stake is to be aware of the maternalistic definitions of care1 which still bear heavy weight in the construction of gendered roles, in turn closely associating care with maternal care, whereby women become the bestower of good life for the family and for the State. It is especially true when confronted to critical conditions, as it’s been the 1 Neal Noddings, Caring. A Feminist Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, University of California Press, Berkeley 1984.

case with the pandemic2. This correlates to the age-old question of a double presence3: the Italian welfare system is based on the family, wherein the care provided by the mothers and daughters integrates what services fail to offer to fulfil the needs of children and individuals requiring assistance, thus becoming an integral part of the subsidiary process of private welfare. Hence the particular importance of the concept of self-determination in the context of Italian feminism, inasmuch as it puts arbitrary choice forward as opposed to the reproductive and care processes, historically more contingent in Italy (and similarly in Southern Europe) than elsewhere. There is a clear refusal of the idea that bodies are predestined to be reproductive. Thus the movement Non Una di Meno (“Ni Una Menos”) insists on a self-determination income4; it is seen as an 2 Cristina Morini, Take Care: Society of Care and Self-determination Income, Cogut Institute for Humanities, Brown University, May 2020, https://blogs.brown.edu/humanities/ archives/344. 3 Laura Balbo, La doppia presenza, “Inchiesta”, n. 32, pp.3-6. 4 A self-determination income has a broad and generalised sense and doesn’t only apply to specific categories of society. From the English translation of Non Una di Meno’s document, We Have a Plan: Feminist Plan To Combat Male Violence Against Women and Gender-Based Violence, November 2017, p.17: “An unconditional universal basic income that ensures self-sufficiency, regardless of one’s work situation and citizenship and residence status. Income that would guarantee financial independence and therefore material support for women recovering from abuse (whether domestic or in the workplace). More generally, this would be an effective means of preventing gender-based violence, as it would free us from blackmail and exploitation in the workplace, from instability, from harassment.”

essential tool, not only as a means of defence against male violence (including economical violence) but also a potential device for affirmation and protection against blackmail over or at work and within the family; especially with atypical work contracts increasingly affecting new generations of women. It should be noted that, in the past just as much as today, and I shall repeat, especially in Italy, care has been a controversial word over which women have “worked” a lot. The ethical principles of commonality and interdependence which are, in principle, at the root of the idea of care are on the one end agreeable, though on the other, care in the name of love, intended as altruistic and selfless, has become a vehicle for gender inequality. The idea that women would have a natural tendency to love and care for the other, thus carrying out their destiny, is deep-rooted in modernity. When care comes into question, women always risk becoming imprisoned in emotional subjection, all the more powerful as it is concealed under the veil of juridical and social equality. Additionally, and today more than ever, it seems clear to me that the deployment of empathy and affection, the production of information, commodification of culture and of the body, the evocation of self care and taking care are nothing but the necessary result of the unfolding of the contradiction inherent to the totality of the contemporary biocapitalist mode of production. I’ve said this before, engagée | 7

Körperpolitiken der Sorge und Solidarität in pandemischen Zeiten

Jule Govrin

Ineinander verwoben und durcheinander verwundbar

n Schlachthäusern schuftende Körper, die sich schutzlos in Kälte und Kontakt infizieren. In Schutzanzügen umhüllte Körper, die andere Körper auf Corona testen. Menschen mit Masken überall – auf der Straße, im Supermarkt. Lastwagen, die in Bergamo Leichen wegbringen. Menschen in Moria, eingesperrt in überfüllten Lagern an den Grenzen Europas. Angehörige in Manaus, die vor dem Krankenhaus Schlange stehen, um Sauerstoffflaschen für um Atem ringende Angehörige abzuliefern. Obdachlose Menschen, auf einem Parkplatz in markierten Parzellen liegend, im Hintergrund ein leeres Luxushotel. Frenetisch feiernde Körpermengen auf den Demonstrationen derjenigen, die das Virus und seine Gefahren verleugnen. Die Pandemie eröffnet einen neuen Kreislauf an Körperbildern. Diese zeugen von Vereinzelung und Verzweiflung, von Schutzlosigkeit und Gefährdung. Sorgenlos sind dabei die wenigsten. Die Mehrheit lebt inmitten der menschlichen Misere. Dennoch durchziehen diese Massen an Körpern, die die globale Welt bevölkern, feine Unterschiede. Obwohl alle Körper vom Virus bedroht werden, macht es einen lebensentscheidenden Unterschied, ob man unter den Lasten des Lockdowns leidet, während man im war-

men Wohnzimmer verweilt, ob man sich der Selbstsorge hingeben darf oder Sorge für andere zu tragen hat, ob man vom Homeoffice aus den Karrierepfad fortsetzt oder ohne Arbeitsschutz der Ansteckungsgefahr ausgesetzt ist. Ob man ein Zuhause hat oder bloß ein Zelt, das von Wind und Wetter zerklüftet wird. Die neue Raumordnung der Körper, die sich in der Corona-Krise auftut, macht die alte Verelendung von Körpern schmerzhaft sichtbar. Zugleich macht die Pandemie Körperlichkeit anders erfahrbar. Denn der Virus wirft uns auf unsere geteilte Verwundbarkeit zurück und verweist uns auf globale Abhängigkeiten. Zur Gleichheit und Ungleichmachung von Körpern Verwundbarkeit lässt sich als Modus einer Gleichheit der Körper verstehen, da wir fortwährend der affektiven und physischen Fürsorge bedürfen. Dieser Gedanke mag banal anmuten, doch die Ethik der Verwundbarkeit, wie sie Judith Butler Gefährdetes Leben vorschlägt, greift tief in unser Verständnis von Körperlichkeit ein. In solch einer Betrachtungsweise bildet der Körper keine eingekapselte Einheit, stattdessen bewegt er sich in einem soziosomatischen

Raum, ist anderen gegenüber offen und ausgesetzt. Das zwischenkörperliche Dasein des Sozialen zeugt von der politischen Dimension, die Körperlichkeit innewohnt. Insofern ist Verwundbarkeit als Modus der Gleichheit von Körpern zu verstehen. Dieser Gedanke von Gleichheit stellt sich entschieden den Ideen eines gleichmachenden Universalismus entgegen, wie sie seit der Aufklärung kursieren. Stattdessen deutet sich ein Universalismus von unten an, der auf Differenz und Pluralität aufbaut. Verwundbarkeit als Grundbedingung menschlichen Daseins geht uns im pandemischen Leben gründlich unter die Haut: Wir erleben unsere Abhängigkeit in der Sehnsucht nach körperlicher, affektiver Nähe, ebenso erleben wir sie im Wissen darum, von anderen abzuhängen, um die Lasten des Alltags zu stemmen, um unsere kranken Körper zu versorgen. Zeitgleich tritt zutage, wie Körper ungleich gemacht werden, in einem Moment, in dem austeritätspolitisch marodierte Gesundheitssysteme überlastet sind und der Schutz vor Ansteckung Wenigen gewährt wird. Dieses Symptom der Ungleichmachung von Körpern ist tief in die Kapitalismusgeschichte eingelassen. An deren Anfang stand die Hobbes‘sche Mär des Körpers als Privateigentum. Diese Rahmung des Körpers als Besitzobjekt führte schließlich zu dessen instrumenteller Ausbeutung, zur Verwertung seiner Arbeitskraft. Währenddessen wurde die Sorge um ihn, die Aufgabe, seine Arbeitskraft zu sichern, durch die vergeschlechtlichte Arbeitsteilung Frauen aufgebürdet. Kurzum, die Kapitalismusgeschichte entblößt sich als Geschichte der gekrümmten, erschöpften, ausgelaugten Körper. Währenddessen nährte die Aufklärungsphilosophie das maskuline Ideal des selbstgenügsamen Individuums, das keinerlei körperliche Bedürfnisse nach Fürsorge zu bergen scheint – so zeigt sich der Mensch im Naturzustand, wie ihn Jean-Jacques Rousseau nacherzählt. Unwillentlich konturierte er mit diesem Körperbild einer ursprünglichen Unabhängigkeit die Figur des Homo Oeconomicus. Dieses eigenverantwortliche Entrepreneur verwaltet seinen Körper als Humankapital, in das es bestmöglich zu investieren gilt. Heutzutage äußert sich der humankapitalistische Hype im permanenten Zwang zur Selbstsorge; im Imperativ und Komparativ, den Körper zu formen und zu stählen, um ihn fit und resilient für engagée | 9

On care as collective self-defence against the punitive logic of security | Iida Käyhkö

hink of a time you felt safe. Perhaps in bed on a cold night, when someone has brought you a hot water bottle to place at the foot of the bed, or turned the heating up a couple of notches, and you’ve started slipping off to sleep. Perhaps after dinner, sat at the table over empty dishes, talking late into the night. Perhaps holding someone’s hand, or receiving kindness from a stranger. Perhaps at any point in your life

when someone has given you the gift of attention, care, love, and community. When your needs have been met, and you have been allowed to feel that your needs are important — not more important than those of other people, but attended to, nevertheless. Perhaps you, too, have been able to offer safety and comfort, and felt safe in your ability to create conditions of love and care. The space between safety and care is hazy.

I feel most safe when I feel cared for. This feeling requires knowing certain things to be true — from knowing that my basic physical needs are met, to knowing that someone will care whether my physical needs are met. Sometimes, when I find myself suddenly dizzy from hunger, or shivering with cold, the physical effects are diminished as soon as someone sets off to find me a banana or a blanket. What I am trying to express is an idea that would probably seem too obvious to be spelled out if it weren’t for the conditions we live under: that safety and care are entwined, and that they exist in physical forms such as shelter, food, and medicine; in social forms such as community, solidarity, and collective experience; and in emotional forms — joy, love, perseverance, grief. In talking about one we are necessarily talking about the other. There are, however, a number of complications involved in setting out the relationship between safety and care. First, the punitive, patriarchal logic which has subordinated ideas of what safety means. Second, the conditions of life which have made both safety and care finite — and scarce — resources. The meaning of security I differentiate between safety — which is entwined with care and community — and security — which is the form of safety offered by the state. Security is institutional and state-centric: security ties our fate as people to the security of the state itself. Security is paranoid in its Hobbesian conceptualisation of human nature as violent, selfish, and aggressive. This logic of security responds to threats — usually defined through racist and colonial frameworks of foreign policy, and racist and classist frameworks of domestic policy — through violent arms: the police and the military on one hand, economic deprivation on the other. Security is always out of reach, conditional on our acceptance of ever more violent intrusions of the state into our lives. The concept of safety, when it comes to the lives of women, is dominated by

a patriarchal logic of control and protection. Iris Marion Young sums up this dynamic in her essay The Logic of Masculinist Protection1: An exposition of the gendered logic of the masculine role of protector in relation to women and children illuminates the meaning and effective appeal of a security state that wages war abroad and expects obedience and loyalty at home. In this patriarchal logic, the role of the masculine protector puts those protected, paradigmatically women and children, in a subordinate position of dependence and obedience. By this logic, women are safe in the home, threats come in the form of dangerous, unknown men, and the duty of protection is performed by the father, brother, or husband. Of course, this logic does not extend protection to all women, in all situations: the woman deserving of protection is predominantly white, heterosexual, bourgeois, and — above all — pure. Her purity, in fact, is the object of protection, not her life. Her grateful obedience is the price of protection. Young draws a parallel between security at home and security in the homeland. The security state is authoritarian and paternalistic, expecting loyalty and obedience from its citizens in exchange for security. The state reserves the right to define security threats, and to exclude from its protection those deemed threatening to the structures of power upon which the state is built. This is done most obviously through racist policing targeting marginalised communities. The greatest con of the security state is to convince swathes of the population that its true aim is protection, when in reality it leaves in its wake such immense destruction.

1 Iris Marion Young, The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2003, 1-25.

Security can mask itself as safety and care. Care has become an element in the surveillance economy and in punitive systems of injustice and imprisonment. Police, prison, and immigration officers carry out their safeguarding duties through arrest, detention, and enforcement of borders. Those in caring professions — health and social workers, as well as teachers and childcare workers — are made to take on duties of surveillance and border control. The patriarchal violence of the security state subsumes the vocabulary of care, presenting an image of safety in punishment and paranoia. Breaking through these paradigms of safety spelled out by patriarchy and capitalism allows us to arrive at a new horizon: that alternative forms of not just care, but also safety, are constantly articulated and present in our lives. False scarcity, punishment and fear are so deeply embedded in how security functions, that fighting them requires great intent and imagination. Creating safety When we create different ways of thinking about what it means to be safe, outside of the vision of care and security offered by states and capital, we create an oppositional force. Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues that prison abolition is about the entirety of human-environmental relations2; breaking the stronghold of the patriarchal and punitive perspective of a security logic has the power to change everything. For conceptualising this resistance, I suggest thinking of care in a framework of holistic self-defence. For the Kurdish freedom movement, self-defence is a natural part of the life of every organism, and every collective. This theory and practice, set out by Abdullah Öcalan, has been expanded upon by the Kurdish women’s movement over several decades — it is most clearly practised in efforts to create autonomy and collective power in aspects of everyday life. Dilar Dirik, an activist and academic with the Kurdish women’s movement, summarises the basic argument3: Every living organism, a rose, a bee, has its mechanisms of self-defence in order to protect and express its existence – with thorns, stings, teeth, claws, etc., not to dominate, exploit or unnecessarily destroy another creature but to preserve itself and meet its vital needs. Self-defence involves a range of tools: it involves physical and armed self-defence as well as the psychological capacity to 2 Rachel Kushner, Is Prison Necessary? New York Times Magazine, April 17, 2019. 3 Dilar Dirik. Feminist pacifism or passive-ism? Open Democracy, 7 March, 2017.

resist narratives limiting collective autonomy. It also involves care, as a tool in maintaining and reimagining community. The basic shared assertion is that care and community be at the heart of our resistance to oppression: what we build is an understanding that our survival is not dependent on the state and its security model, but on the safety, freedom, and justice we can create in our lives. This safety can look like the prison abolitionist organising already happening in many communities: organising against immigration raids, supporting survivors of abuse, and facilitating arrestee support. But it just as crucially involves building autonomy and self-organisation through food and housing cooperatives and collective childcare practices. Positioning care at the heart of our struggle means making our communities safe by establishing that our lives have meaning and value — not because of our productivity, but because of our care for each other. The capacity to create safety rests within us, and in fighting for it. I want to conclude by recounting some experiences I have had in organising and participating in Women’s Strike actions on International Women’s Day over the last several years. The movement is part of a global liberation struggle: a strike on unpaid as well as paid labour, care work, and reproductive work, taking the struggle to the kitchens, bedrooms, streets, and squares of the world. In the UK, the movement has taken its direction from, and worked side by side with, sex workers, trans women, the Kurdish women’s movement, and Latinx feminist collectives. Over a number of years organising as feminists for the Women’s Strike, we have learnt to care for each other in different ways. We have developed practices such as providing childcare and hot food at our meetings, and a strike fund enabling many more people to join the strike. The phrase rings true despite its frequent repetition: we keep each other safe in order to be dangerous together. It is in our collective safety that we pose the greatest threat to security — through proving to ourselves that we can outgrow the false promises of patriarchal protection. I asked you earlier to think of a time when you have felt safe. Among my many memories, some specific ones come to mind: walking in a mass of people dressed in red, dancing by a sound system, chanting as one. Above all, one repeatedly stands out: the moment of spilling from the pavement into the road, stopping the flow of traffic, making a mass of thousands of people into a revolt of noise and disruption. Those are moments of sparkling clarity, moments of laughter through fear. A demonstration of collective power — safety in our revolutionary, caring, joyful, militant numbers. From there, I can see the horizon.

A C Care Crisis. What caused it and how can we end it? | Interview with Emma Dowling

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In your new book The Care Crisis how do you define care? Care is central to the reproduction of society and thus one of its bedrocks, part of a fundamental infrastructure which holds society together. Without care, we would not be able to live, let alone be economically productive. However, care cannot be reduced to the simple functionality of maintaining life or enabling economic activity. There is a difference between, say, bathing and clothing an elderly person so that she can survive, and the act of doing so carefully, which means taking time, being attentive, and acting with affection and concern. The latter makes life worth living, but it may also very well prolong the cared-for person’s life. Hence, caring effects are not optional. Care is an activity orientated towards meeting the emotional or physical needs of others (or tending to one’s own needs), but it’s also part of a particular configuration of social relationships that are politically, economically, and historically conditioned, including along gendered, racialised, and classed lines. The essential characteristic of care is also the source of its exploitation, namely the feelings of compassion or a sense of responsibility someone may have for others. That’s why, in the book, I’m attentive to ideologies of caring. You claim that care is in crisis. What is a crisis? When and for whom care is in crisis? The crisis of care is linked to the dynamics of the capitalist economy. Capitalism requires labour power to

function, whereas at the same time, it needs to keep the cost of reproducing that labour power to a minimum. There is a care crisis when people who need care are unable to access the care they need, and when those people who provide care, i.e. those who are doing work in some form, whether paid or unpaid, do so under increasingly difficult conditions. The specific focus of my book is the growing care crisis in Britain following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. You argue that the current crisis is an effect of the global financial crisis and the ensuing austerity measures. Can you tell us more about how the care crisis unfolds? The relationship between capitalism and care is crisis-prone, given the dynamic I describe above. But there have also been periods of relative stability in global north countries. This was the case, for example, with the post-war period of Fordism-Keynesianism, even if this relative stability relied on the exploitation and subordination of women’s unpaid labour in the home. Since the 1970s, we’ve seen a rise in female labour market participation, yet without the fundamental transformation of the sexual division of labour. At the same time globalisation and financialisation have undermined capital’s reliance on a particular national labour force, and hence its reproduction. We’ve also seen significant wage stagnation, so that households require the income of two workers to make ends meet. This means that more waged work has to be done out-

side the home, which also takes time away from being able to do the work of social reproduction and care. Add to this austerity and welfare state retrenchment - the chipping away of public infrastructures - especially in areas that are not conducive to augmenting the productivity of the workforce. Moreover, privatisation and marketisation render care an investment opportunity for capital. Increasingly, those who can afford to pay for privatised services do so, and those who can’t have to do the work themselves. Growing inequality is underscored by a politics of individual responsibility for care. But it has to be said that even though these are general trends, they haven’t occurred in exactly the same ways everywhere. Britain is a country in which these developments have been particularly stark, where a combination of austerity measures and labour market deregulation, along with the marketisation and financialisation of care, has led to reduced access to care and put pressure on pay and working conditions for care workers. What do you mean by 'care fix'? ‘Care fix’ is a term I use to give a name to short-term solutions to the care crisis that harmonise the interests of capital with an alleviation of the most egregious care deficits. Such care fixes could be geared towards maintaining a sufficient supply of labour power or rendering care and social reproduction profitable through marketisation. One problem is that such care fixes displace crises

How to Open Up the Future? On Care and Survival | Amy Clark

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he current pandemic has made the necessity of a revolution in care more explicit than ever. All the ways in which care is in crisis and the merciless workings of the uncaring capitalist state have been laid bare. The British government has caused thousands of deaths by depriving people – especially disabled people and people of colour – of healthcare and care services. Care and health workers have been asked to risk their lives in unsafe and increasingly precarious workplaces to provide care services, whilst communities have stepped up to offer mutual aid and families have shouldered even more caring burdens than before. None of this is new: it is merely the deepening of a crisis already being felt across the world. However, even as care is in crisis (or as capitalism’s crisis manifests as a crisis of care), I argue that care has revolutionary potential outside the exhaustive, racialised and gendered labours that capitalism relies on. That is, as much as we need to transform capitalist relations of care, we need to recognise the importance of care as a way to sustain our fight, transform future potentialities, and make it possible to imagine and build new revolutionary worlds.

One of the first times I engaged with care as a generative political practice was on the picket line. In 2018, University College Union (UCU) members went on strike at over sixty universities1. Students joined staff at the mass picket lines and protests, and staged their own rallies and occupations, whilst also engaging in quieter, smaller strategies of organising. At my university, students - particularly women, queer people and people of colour - organised daily breakfast runs to pickets around the city, carrying hot water, coffee, tea and biscuits to the staff on strike. These moments of care were mundane and routine, but they were crucial ways we resisted the orientations of the institution. The collective energy on the picket lines during these runs was incredible, not least because the moment was an opportunity for people to build new socialities with each other in an institution that is entirely hostile to formations of solidarity between students and staff. We refused the neoliberal orientations of the marketised university, which both creates material and affective situations of precarity, and isolates students and staff from each other. On the picket lines, our emergent capacities to do, create, and be together were generated through acts of nurture, through tangible forms of caring that enabled us to inhabit spaces collectively, and encounter each other anew.

Immediately, to care is to survive; care is a futural practice. As politically diverse as the mutual aid efforts during the pandemic have been, they exist because communities recognised that if we did not help each other, we would receive no help at all. For queer people, care has long been an important part of community survival. Deborah Gould2 documents the queer relations of care and community present in AIDS activism during the 1980s and 1990s. In Moving Politics, Gould traces the first mass mobilisations of queer people around AIDS/HIV as movements of caretaking: where the state and the heterosexual nuclear family failed, queer forms of care and kinship emerged. Elsewhere, the Black Panther Breakfast program fed thousands of children in order to ensure the survival of Black people and communities in the face of a capitalist, racist state hostile to their existence. Within marginalised, oppressed and exploited communities we care for each other for the same reason: no-one else, especially the capitalist state, will do so. The UCU picket lines are a small example of this transformative potential of care - staff weren’t surviving off morning coffee! - but one that situated itself in an important legacy of community care and solidarity for workers on strike. The work of Women Against Pit Closures and community support during the miners’ strikes, for instance, was crucial to the survival of both the people on strike and the movement itself. We care so we (as individuals, communities, collectives) survive, but care is also a way to make our struggle sustainable. The picket line – and the kitchens in the background - can become a site from which revolutionary struggle is fed and nurtured. It is for this reason that, although care is not as explicitly disruptive as direct action (and shouldn’t replace it), caring outside and against the state has revolutionary potential. As Saidiya Hartman has said, “care is the antidote to violence”3: it is a transformative site of collective survival and resistance. If care allows people and their movements of resistance to survive into the future, it is also a generative practice, one that might open up future possibilities and potentialities. Sara Ahmed uses the language of direction and re-direction to explore the ways in which marginalised people care for themselves and their communities4. Ahmed argues that directing care towards ‘ourselves’ (with her ‘us’ being those in greatest proximity to death - Black people, people of colour, queer people) means re2 Gould, D. B. 2009. Moving Politics. University of Chicago Press.

1 https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/9242/ UCU-announces-14-strike-dates-at-61-universities-in-pensions-row

3 Hartman, Saidiya. In the Wake: A Salon in Honor of Christina Sharpe. Recorded 2017 at Barnard College. 4 https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/08/25/selfcare-as-warfare/

Care

Zur kollektiven Verantwortung von Reproduktionsarbeit Johanna Reckewerth

The City engagée | 17

in Sprichwort besagt, es brauche ein ganzes Dorf, um ein Kind großzuziehen. Die Gestaltung alltäglicher Räume suggeriert allerdings: Sorgetragende sind nicht willkommen. In diesem Beitrag wird die Frage nach der kollektiven Verantwortung von Reproduktionsarbeit aufgeworfen und anhand feministischer Stadtforschung diskutiert. Vor diesem Hintergrund sollten die räumlichen Reproduktionsbedingungen bei der Debatte um Care-Gerechtigkeit berücksichtigt werden, denn sie bestimmen über Ein- und Ausschluss von Sorgetragenden an der Teilhabe unserer Gesellschaft.

Care & Frauen

eder Mensch ist abhängig von der Sorge und affektiven Zuwendung anderer - ohne gegenseitige Fürsorge wären wir als Gesellschaft nicht überlebensfähig. Dennoch wird Care-Arbeit als randständiges Thema behandelt: Care-Arbeit ist unsichtbar, wird der privaten Sphäre zugeordnet und überwiegend von Frauen innerhalb der Kernfamilie verrichtet – ohne monetäre oder soziale Anerkennung. Warum wird etwas so zentrales, so randständig gestaltet? Grundlage der Unsichtbarkeit von Care ist ein kulturell verankertes Machtgefälle dichotomer Zuschreibungen von Männlichkeit/ Weiblichkeit, Erwerbsarbeit/ Reproduktionsarbeit, rational/ emotional, öffentlich/ privat bei der die als männlich gelesenen Qualitäten über den weiblichen stehen. Donna Haraway (1991: 161) fasst dies wie folgt zusammen: „Some differences are playful; some

are poles of world historical systems of domination”. Die in der Industrialisierung etablierte geschlechtliche Arbeitsteilung dient als Grundlage der kapitalistischen Arbeits- und Produktionsverhältnisse. Sprich, die Produktion ist nur möglich durch die unbezahlte Reproduktionsarbeit von Frauen: „Die Frauen sind nicht das ‚Herz der Familie‘, sondern das Herz des Kapitals. Es steht und fällt damit, sich ihrer Liebe, ihrer ‚Natur‘, ihrer Arbeit umsonst bedienen zu können.“ (Bock/Duden 1977: 178). Auch wenn Frauen heute erwerbsarbeiten, liegt die Verantwortung für Sorgearbeit weiterhin bei ihnen. Die meiste Last liegt dabei auf Frauen mit Kindern, weswegen diese hier näher in den Blick genommen werden. Laut dem Gender Care-Gap, der Aufschluss über die geschlechtsspezifische Verteilung von Care-Arbeit gibt, leisten Frauen in Deutschland im Durchschnitt 52,4 % mehr CareArbeit als Männer. Bei Paarhaushalten mit Kindern steigt der Wert auf 83,3 % (BMFSFJ 2017: 39). Diese zusätzliche Arbeitsbelastung verringert nicht nur die Ressourcen für persönliche Projekte, sondern erschwert auch den Zugang zur Erwerbsarbeit, was sich in einer niedrigeren Rente (Gender Pension-Gap) niederschlägt. Die Vereinbarkeit von Familien- und Erwerbsarbeit wird daher bei der Gleichstellung der Geschlechter als besonders relevanter Aspekt angesehen. Ein neoliberaler Feminismus, der die Erwerbsarbeitskarriere der Frau propagiert, bietet allerdings keine Lösung. Care-

Arbeit ist intersektional vernetzt und vertikal strukturiert: die Soziologin Arlie Russell Hochschild prägte den Begriff der Global CareChains, bei dem Migrant*innen unterbezahlte Care-Arbeit für Privilegierte übernehmen und wiederum eine Versorgungslücke in ihrer eigenen Familie hinterlassen. Diese hierarchische Umverteilung von Care-Arbeit wirft die Frage auf, für wessen Bedürfnisse gesorgt wird und wer dafür aufkommt.

Care & Raum

bwohl Reproduktionsarbeit dem Häuslichen zugeschrieben wird, ist sie verwoben mit der öffentlichen Infrastruktur: Einkäufe müssen erledigt werden, das eine Kind zur Kita, das andere zur Schule gebracht werden und hinzu kommen die Wege für Arztbesuche und Freizeitaktivitäten. Der Gestaltung alltäglicher Räume wohnt daher eine Machtposition inne, denn sie entscheidet über Ein- und Ausschluss von gesellschaftlicher Teilhabe Sorgetragender. Care wird in der Planung allerdings selten mitgedacht. Es hat sich ein androzentrisches „Normalitätsdenken“ (Becker 2004: 380) in der Stadtplanung etabliert, welches das Geschlechterverhältnis weiter in den Raum einschreibt. Daher ist eine feministische Analyse wichtig, die den Status quo in Frage stellt und blinde Flecken aufdeckt. Städte sind orientiert an der männlichen Erwerbsarbeiterbiographie. Das 1933 bei der Charta von Athen (CIAM) festgelegte Prinzip der „funktionalen Stadt“, welches die Stadt nach einer räumlichen

Who cares if it's human? Towards a Socialist Feminist vision for socially reproductive AI Elizabeth Fetterolf

he late anthropologist David Graeber concludes his study of “bullshit jobs” by identifying their foil: care work.1 He argues that care work is impervious to automation and he is not alone. A Slate article entitled “The Last Human Job” posits that work requiring “a human touch” could resist or at least stave off the rise of robots.2 But something needs to change about how care functions under capitalism. Care is undervalued, yet essential, and capitalism has created a shortage — what Nancy Fraser calls a “crisis of care.” For Fraser and other socialist feminists, the solution is ending capitalism, yet technology companies are working towards a different end: the automation of this supposedly untouchable sector. PARO, a companion robot for elders, has been around for two decades.3 In 2016, Toyota launched a billion-dollar research initiative focused on healthcare support robots,4 and a year later Amazon filed a patent for voice-based emotional recognition technology - a move towards transforming Alexa from smart speaker to confidante. Earlier 1 Graeber, David. 2018. Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do about It. New York: Simon & Schuster. 2 Weingarten, Elizabeth. October 4, 2017. “The last human job”. Slate. www.slate.com/technology/2017/10/could-mass-automation-makeus-revalue-care-work.html 3 Hung, Lillian et al. 2019. “The benefits of and barriers to using a social robot PARO in care settings: A scoping review”. BMC Geriatrics, 19 (1), 232. doi.org/10.1186/s12877-019-1244-6 4 GlobalData. January 2, 2020. “What are the main types of robots used in healthcare?” Medical Device Network. www.medicaldevice-network.com/ comment/what-are-the-main-types-of-robots-used-in-healthcare/

this year, Hanson Robotics, producers of the viral humanoid robot Sophia, promised to manufacture an “army” of COVID-safe caregivers to assist with healthcare, education, and companionship.5 Like Fraser, Silicon Valley has identified a dearth of care under late capitalism, but propose artificial intelligence (AI) as a market-driven solution. Anthropologist Sherry Turkle has been a consistently vocal critic of ‘care AI’. In her ethnographic research on PARO, she argues that automatisation creates a new kind of isolation for an already neglected population.6 To Turkle, care is an inherently human and (ideally) reciprocal act — by automating it both parties lose something of themselves. While Turkle is right to challenge techno-dystopian visions, her argument that caring is and must always be human work parallels the way that care has been naturalised for political and economic purposes. In this article, I will argue that care work is not inherently human, nor is it inherently gendered, good, or rewarding. We desperately need a socialist feminist solution to the crisis of care, and automation could play a future role along with collectivisation. But to get there, we must fight against technocratic market solutions and dispel essentialist notions of care work. Care work is not at its core “women’s work;” rather it was constructed as such in order to foster unpaid work 5 Hennessy, Michelle. January 24, 2021. “Makers of Sophia the robot plan mass rollout amid pandemic”. Reuters. www.reuters.com/article/ us-hongkong-robot/makers-of-sophia-the-robot-plan-mass-rolloutamid-pandemic-idUSKBN29U03X 6 Turkle, Sherry. 2012. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books. engagée | 19

The Excess: On Covid and Uncherished Life | Flannán Delaney

THE

n the sea just off Grenada is an underwater sculpture park. Circles of concrete human figures, bolted together but each one individual, hold each other’s hands and gaze out into the great expanse of the ocean, as corals and seaweeds claim them. Drowned faces with African features emerge from rock and sand. A man sits typing, his words unreadable; women raise their hands towards the glow of sunlight at the surface; a lost world, overtaken by water. The work is usually described as a memorial to the enslaved people who died in the Middle Passage between Africa and the West Indies, and especially to those who were cast overboard in stormy seas, their bodies just another cargo. Ballast. An interesting aspect to this is that, if you look up the artist Jason deCaires Taylor’s original commentary on the work, it’s clear that he did not intend this reading. Instead, he had in mind a fairly vague statement about human adaptability; a standard sort of neoliberal positivity, with the signature blandness of so much “public art”. It took local commentators — from the same islander population whose features had been cast and reproduced in the faces of those underwater figures — to see what he could not, and to transform the sculptures into an unofficial memorial. Just as, all

over the world in May, statues celebrating the racist past were torn down by many hands, so too this monument was erected by popular consent and appropriation. It was not given, but taken, and in taking was transformed from “public art” into something stranger, greater, infinitely more haunting. On the 11th of April Mel Baggs died. For most of hir adult life, Mel had been writing about disability and autism; about the experience of having a body and mind that betray you, but even more so about being perceived as valueless, existing at the borders of what society recognises as human. Much of hir writing was hosted at a blog titled ‘Ballastexistenz’, a term the Nazis used in propaganda to describe the lives of disabled people, whom they saw as unnecessary, a waste of life; literally, ‘Ballast Existence’.The cause of Mel’s death is believed to be respiratory failure. Sie was 39 years old. Hir family have not stated whether sie was suffering from Covid-19, and it may not even be known, but it’s clear from Mel’s last few blog posts that sie was struggling to access the medical care sie needed amidst the pandemic. At very least, sie would be counted, then, as one of 2020’s ‘Excess Deaths’. So far, the UK has had somewhere around sixty thousand of these; the US, something like three hundred thousand.

In June, as lockdown prematurely eased and the summer warmth began to breed life from dead things, they began to find the bodies, several hundred in London alone. On the second of the month, the government released the report which it had commissioned into the racial disparities in Covid-19 deaths. It had made several attempts to delay doing so. The report was not ready; the report was ready, but not ready

enough; this was, we were assured, definitely nothing to do with the mass international protests against racism occurring at the time of its release. Finally, under pressure, the report was produced, and was striking mostly for its shallowness; it merely underlined facts already known. Those who had died so far had been, overwhelmingly, old; they had also been disproportionately — extremely disproportionately — Black, or South Asian; they had been poor. Men were somewhat more likely to die than women. Nothing was ventured as to the causes of these inequalities. We know that the racial disparity, in particular, does not seem to have been genetic; it also cannot be reduced to poverty, although poverty was an independent factor which affected both the chance of getting Covid and the chance of surviving it. The idea that this might, itself, be an emergency — an emergency within our emergency — was never seriously entertained. The report seems to have had no impact upon the loosening of lockdown, the march back to a middle class normality of garden centre and IKEA visits, a normality in which cleaners and builders packed the tubes which carried them to their unZoomable jobs, wearing, at best, improvised PPE which they had not been trained to use.

EXCESS

Counting excess deaths is the last resort of the historian where epidemiological records are patchy. It’s been used to estimate the death toll from the Black Death, from the cholera epidemics that swept through the poor of Europe in the nineteenth century, from the influenza that killed in the chaotic and under-documented aftermath of the First World War. And now, in 2020, it is our best way of counting Covid’s silent dead. Many of those, the excess, are estimated to be among Covid’s direct victims, infected with the virus and dying from its effects, although the officially recorded causes of death do not always reflect this. At the height of the first wave, tests were hard to come by and concentrated on hospitals. And despite the national focus on the NHS, much of the dying has happened quietly, in isolated rooms in care homes, in bedsits and one-bedroom flats.

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Origamy Solidarity | Morrigan Nihil

Who Cares | 22

Fold #1

’m a woman, and I have a son; he’s 27, I’m 52. He was born with a rare condition called Sturge Weber Syndrome (SWS), which essentially means that he has a birthmark on his brain, as well as one on his face. Right from the off, my kid looked different. People stared. We were ‘other’. We didn’t fit. Babies are meant to be bonnie. And then, like a lot of children with SWS, he started having seizures, sometimes hundreds a day. He’d go into status and there was nothing the doctors could do, except hook him up to a million machines in intensive care and pump him full of drugs that didn’t work.

It’s hard to deal with trauma, especially when it’s endlessly repeating, when there’s no escape. This past New Year’s Eve is a good example. He said he had a headache. Oh my God, he’s got a headache. What if he starts having seizures? Will we be able to get an ambulance? How full is Accident and Emergency? Will he catch Covid-19 if he goes into hospital? Is he at increased risk? Have they repurposed the neurological wards? Do they have enough staff available? If they won’t let us stay with him, who’s going to monitor and advocate on his behalf? Has he got any clean pyjamas? These thoughts ran through my head in less than 60 seconds.

The ‘cure’ for unilateral SWS is hemispherectomy - removal or disconnection of the affected half of the brain. The prognosis is always uncertain. We were offered this experimental procedure when our son was two years old. We declined for a variety of reasons, but the main issue was consent. Who were we to decide which bits of him to keep and which bits of him to chuck in a bucket? Did we have that right? We didn’t think so.

‘You’re kind of neurotic,’ someone once said to me. Really? Am I? ‘Just relax. Just breathe. Just take it as it comes.’ Yeah, OK, I’ll do that. Hold on a sec while I flick this switch. Phew, that’s better. If only I’d known the secret to all of this was me trying harder to feel less powerless. Thanks for that. Now I can cope.

Being the parent of a medically fragile person is traumatic. I can’t change the fact that he has a neurological disorder. I can’t change the fact that, sometimes, this will make him dangerously ill. And I can’t change the fact that no one seems to really understand what it means to live like this.

Fold #3

Fold #2

t the beginning of the first UK lockdown in Spring 2020, I read Sartre’s ‘Existentialist Theory of Consciousness’. The words just sort of slid past my eyes, but I did get caught up in the idea of the reflective and the reflected. Subject and object. But, as Sartre says, there’s more to it than that. We don’t start mediated and distorted. Initially, there’s no ‘I’. Instead, we see as feeling things, not as thinking things. We’re unreflective, kind of pure, kind of selfless.

he world around me can be very disorientating. I don’t make the best sense of it, nor it of me. I’m so knackered, my processing speeds are permanently set to ‘crawl’. My memory is shot to pieces, because a thousand bedside vigils have taken their toll. It’s like that scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy gets snatched up by the tornado. There’s houses and chickens and boats flying through the air, and when she wakes up, she finds herself trapped in a technicolour dystopia. This is my reality. And it certainly isn’t Kansas anymore, Toto. Which is a shame, you know, because I was expecting Kansas. We were all expecting Kansas. None of us were prepared for this. The unreflective is naked; it doesn’t wear the clothes of self-consciousness. It feels what it sees. When pandemic panic first set in, there were empty supermarket shelves. A friend of mine blogged his weekly trip

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Quito Tsui & Niyousha Bastani

n i e n c e o f

h e I n c o n v e

C a r e

A Manifesto

s with many things, care as it predominantly exists today has become about convenience. In the murderous tradition of neoclassical economics, hollowed out care trickles down via skeletal healthcare systems and administered by austerity-stricken welfare states. We are left with notions of care where fear of scarcity and the pursuit of convenience designate who cares, how we care, and what we care about. It comes as no surprise then that dominant modes of care make life easy for those already comfortable. Hetero and gendered expectations of care have made life in the pandemic easier for some; whilst racist, classist, and ableist healthcare infrastructures have made access virtually impossible for others. In the wake of the pandemic, the care think pieces have poured in, pointing to how this most recent catastrophe reveals a deeper crisis of care. The solution called for across the board is radical care. But what this constitutes has little consensus. We believe what makes care transformative is a commitment to inconvenience. Transformative care is recognisable through a feeling of inconvenience: it always feels uneasy to come up against structures that neglect us or those we care for. It is always disruptive to push at the walls we want to knock down, whether personally or publicly, on macro or micro scales. The only way to do so is through inconveniencing ourselves. Much has been said on whether truly radical care must be collective instead of individualistic, solidarity-oriented rather than charity-driven, or politically focused as opposed to interpersonal. More remains to be said, however, on the quality of transformative care itself. As Audre Lorde tells us in A Burst of Light, far from being indulgent, self-care can be “an act of warfare” when it is an act of survival in the

face of uncaring structures that expose the self to death. Instead of differentiating care based on its direction or focus, we offer the term inconvenience as the lowest common denominator across transformative forms of care: sitting with uncomfortable feelings, taking actions that disrupt schedules and 10year plans, speaking words that catch in our throats. As radical care becomes increasingly appealing to liberal intellectuals, their inability to envision care differently from the status quo becomes apparent. Judith Butler, who has written extensively on the politics of deeming some lives ‘grievable’ and others disposable, argues in On Rethinking Vulnerability, Violence, Resistance for a vision of solidarity that may seem (in her words) “unrealistic and useless,” but is essential for resisting militaristic logic. For Butler, the key lies in recognising our shared (though unequal) precarity: the basis of solidarity building is that we are vulnerable to death and are all always-already interdependent for survival. Yet Butler does not tell us how the recognition of mutual interdependence will translate into the difficult work of making all lives grievable. The unequal precarity caused by the pandemic has made some realise the vulnerable interdependence of the human condition, and this has perhaps made some more caring toward their neighbours. Still, it has not changed the fundamental rules of who conveniently receives care and who inconveniently provides it. Yet for many, it is the practice of inconvenient care that forms the bedrock of a community, because they know that care based on convenience is unable to meet their needs and to create change. We take our inspiration for understanding transformative care from this knowledge.

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Who Cares | 26

nconvenient care is a complete way of being in the world — one that shapes and reshapes interactions with ourselves, others, and the things we care about. Unlike commercialised notions of care or an ethics of care that only encompasses the explicitly political public sphere, the kind of care we are espousing extends to every sphere of life. Its malleable and expansive quality means that inconvenient care can act as a litmus test — a measure for scrutinising our protest; our self-promotional allyship; our well-meaning but empty think pieces. For care to be transformative it must confront the dynamics of power that limit care to the logic of convenience. The deluge of care think pieces often make their case in a vacuum as though the language of care has not been shaped by, and actively involved in, the isms and “phobias” that fuel injustice: racism, sexism, classism, islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, colonialism. If discussions about care are uncritical they are liable to replicate these very same violent structures. When radical practices of care are transplanted to places built for exclusionary convenience, they lose their essence to cater to comfort. Self-care becomes marketable bath products, short-term solidarity work becomes CV fodder.

Neoliberalism’s limiting value calculus of efficiency and convenience leaks into theories and practices of care when it is not confronted head on. For example, our current socioeconomic system of exploitation emphasises and celebrates output, and accompanying feelings of busyness. The same measure often seeps into how we evaluate our success in pushing back against this system: being a good anti-capitalist often looks and feels akin to being a good neoliberal subject – overworked, drained. Exhaustion in the fight against socio-political tyrannies may be inevitable, but it is not a sufficient condition for transformative change, because the measure itself fulfils the condition of a system that values people through their productivity. It is a

“My Working Will Be The Work”: The Temporality of Care-Work in Feminist Art from the 1970s to the Present Eleri Fowler

isa Baraitser asks ‘what might it mean to… think about staying, inertia, lack of the flow of time, precisely as a way to understand care’? The exigencies of this type of labour mean that time is experienced differently when caring. Care is the work of sustaining what already exists. Sustaining is a durational activity, it has to progress in tandem with – and, indeed, is what ensures – its object’s ongoing existence in the world. Therefore, unlike other types of labour, care must be carried out continuously. Because things must be consistently kept going, the de-

mand for care is self-renewing. This makes the work repetitive, necessitating the performance of the same tasks again and again; you clean off the dirt and it returns the next day, you make a meal and soon enough someone will be hungry. The fact that these activities need to be done incessantly means, as Leopolda Fortunati puts it, ‘the working day tends to be the same as the duration of the day itself ’. The particular temporality of care prevents it from being sped up and rationalised towards the production of surplus value. The ongoing necessity of care runs up against capital’s reluctance to in-

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he story of this issue’s art contributions is one of rewarding encounters and generous solidarities. We are grateful that, with Zuzanna Czebatul, the Artist Charity Aid Network (ACAN), and the solidaripod Podcast, a small network has formed in which éngagee #10 is now another hub. Reaching out to potential but, to date, unknown collaborators and receiving positive and encouraging responses that eventually lead to a contribution is always a precious experience. This weighs all the more in pandemic times, when these moments of new connections, of getting to know friends of friends, of plotting together with others, have become rare und unlikely. But let’s start at the beginning. As we went through the essay proposals in late 2020, we felt that we would like to include a specific artistic position that comments on the topics and questions of this issue, rather than a variety of contributions from different artists. Manischa Eichwalder, author of an essay in this issue on data cleaning as reproductive work, made us aware of Zuzanna Czebatul’s work. This intuition proved to be right. What we immediately liked about Zuzanna’s work is how it seems to be clearly politically motivated in the sense that it addresses systems of power and oppression, while often keeping a playful and humorous tone. For Art Cologne 2018, Zuzanna produced a vast and trippy carpet that covered the 1,800 sq. metre entrance hall of the Koelnmesse trade centre, referencing the hypnotic design of casino carpets. One could call this a form of non-condescending institutional critique that quite literally doesn’t come from above. It is not afraid of admitting its own involvement in the object of critique, the art-market, and ultimately opens up a space that allows us to question a problematic system while participating in it. In engagée #10, we are printing a series of recently produced collages from Zuzanna that deal with friendship, oppression, resistance, and organisation: „More or less, it’s about the common struggle”, Zuzanna wrote. By negotiating the personal as political and vice versa, and by allowing us to see the continuity between friendships and more public political articulations as modes of relationality, the collages pick up a thread that runs through many contributions to this issue. The Artist Charity Aid Network (ACAN) is a concrete example of the political potential of

friendships. In response to the pandemic, and together with friends Kate Brown, Leon Eisermann and Alexander Egger, Zuzanna initiated ACAN as a non-profit digital platform connecting artists and buyers by way of a donation from each. The goal: Raising funds and awareness for a diversity of causes. Artists could decide which organisations would receive the proceeds from their work. To us, ACAN stands as reminder of solidarity from below, the idea of mutual aid and, not least, the creativity that gained currency especially in the beginning of the lockdown and that all too easily is forgotten amidst the current attempts to go back to normal. Going beyond institutional critique, this can be seen as a small attempt at creating alternative structures within the constraints of the current conditions. “What can we do?” is the guiding question of solidaripod, a project that, like ACAN, emerged during the early days of the pandemic. Over the course of the last year, in more than 50 episodes, solidaripod critically evaluated and discussed many pandemic-related issues and invited an exciting selection of activists, ACAN among them. Most importantly for this issue of engagée, solidaripod doesn’t just produce inspiring podcasts, but are also the masterminds behind our Cover-Art. Thanks to their generosity, we could use their Podcast-picture on our cover. You can follow the work of Zuzanna Czebatul (@ zzzzccczzzz), ACAN (@artistcharityaidnetwork) and solidaripod (@solidaripod) on instagram.

Today

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Enemy

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Who Cares | 32

Survival

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Who Cares | 34

Royal

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ACAN print: Laura Walker: Hot Legs

An den Grenzen Europas. Fürsorgliche Solidarität als aktivistische Praxis [i]

Christin Stühlen, Jasmin Behrends & Darius Reinhardt

Fürsorge[ii] und Solidarität scheinen miteinander verwobene Begriffe, wie zwei Seiten derselben Medaille. Solidarität ohne Fürsorge ist kaum vorstellbar. Und doch: einer genaueren Bestimmung des Verhältnisses beider wurde nur selten explizit nachgegangen. In einem schwachen Sinne ist Fürsorge immer ein Teil von Solidarität, beispielsweise wenn Menschen sich auf einer Demonstration mit anderen Menschen solidarisieren. Darin zeigt sich Fürsorge als die Sorge um das Leben anderer, im Sinne von “to care about something”. In einem emphatischen Sinn sind Fürsorge-Praktiken aber vor allem dort Teil von Solidarität, wo sich diese direkt zwischen Menschen abspielt. In dem Prozess einer solchen Solidarität geht es um den Aufbau von Beziehungen, das Ausdrücken sowie Aushandeln von Bedürfnissen innerhalb (zumeist) ungleichen Positionen im Hinblick auf das Geben und Empfangen von Fürsorge. Ausgehend von der These, dass Solidarität und Fürsorge eng miteinander verknüpft sind, spüren wir dieser Verbindung in konkreten Praktiken der Solidarität in aktivistischen Zusammenhängen nach. Auf Basis eigener Erhebungen analysieren wir eine fürsorgliche Solidarität. Diese fürsorgliche Solidarität basiert maßgeblich auf gelebten Beziehungen und den darin zum Ausdruck kommenden Sorge-Praktiken. Zur genaueren Bestimmung des Zusammenhangs von Fürsorge und Solidarität schauen wir uns die Solidaritäts-Praktiken der aktivistischen Gruppe Kesha Niya an. Die Gruppe ist im französisch-italienischen Grenzgebiet nahe der italienischen Grenzstadt Ventimiglia aktiv und unterstützt dort Migrant:innen, denen der Grenzübertritt nach Frankreich, oft durch Einsatz von Gewalt, verwehrt wird. In Gesprächen mit Aktivist:innen der Gruppe wird deutlich, dass ihre Arbeit maßgeblich auf Fürsorge beruht. Als Fürsorge lassen sich im Anschluss an Joan Tronto und Berenice Fischer “alle menschlichen Handlungen, die zum Erhalt, der Reparatur oder der Fortführung der gemeinsamen Welt beitragen und damit ein gutes Leben für Alle ermöglichen” verstehen. Fürsorge ist somit zentraler Bestandteil

des Lebens, weil wir ohne sie nicht überlebensfähig wären. Menschen sind in materieller wie emotionaler Hinsicht auf die Einbindung in soziale Unterstützungsnetzwerke angewiesen. Aus diesem Verständnis sozialer Abhängigkeit folgt die besondere Bedeutung reproduktiver Arbeit, da das Leben entscheidend von der Bereitstellung von Fürsorge durch Andere abhängt. Praktiken der Fürsorge spielen sich immer zwischen Menschen ab, sie berühren notwendigerweise sowohl die fürsorgende als auch die empfangende Person und schaffen so Beziehungen zwischen Subjekten. Die Solidarität von Kesha Niya ist dementsprechend interpersonell, sie spielt sich zwischen und mit den Menschen ab, die auf ihrem Weg in Ventimiglia ankommen bzw. es durchqueren. Die Begegnungen und Beziehungen, die im Zuge gemeinsamer Aktivitäten geknüpft, aufgebaut und gepflegt werden, sind zentrales Merkmal dieser Solidarität der Aktivist:innen. Im Aufbau interpersoneller Beziehungen liegt der Drehund Angelpunkt für die solidarische Praxis der Aktivist:innen. Im Zuge illegalisierter, grenzüberschreitender Migration geraten Fürsorge-Netzwerke für migrierende und flüchtende Menschen enorm unter Druck. Die Unterstützung durch gewachsene soziale Beziehungen in der Familie, in Freundeskreisen und anderen vertrauten Strukturen fällt mit Beginn der Flucht teilweise oder vollständig weg. Doch nicht nur das: Durch das gewaltsame Vorgehen zunehmend militarisierter Grenzpolizeien geht es für die Menschen im Zuge illegalisierter Grenzübertritte um Leben und Tod. Wir bezeichnen Grenzgebiete in der Tradition kritischer Migrationsforschung deshalb als umkämpfte Orte, weil Menschen in Transit dort systematisch entrechtet werden, während sie gleichzeitig praktisch für ihr Recht auf Bewegungsfreiheit kämpfen. Im Grenzgebiet zwischen den Küstenstädten Menton (Frankreich) und Ventimiglia (Italien) zeigt sich, was das konkret bedeutet. Regelmäßig werden flüchtende Personen durch die französi-

engagée | 37

Who Cares | 38

sche Polizei zurück nach Italien gedrängt. Immer wieder werden sie auch unrechtmäßig festgenommen. Serena Chiodo und Anna Dotti haben dies in der gleichnamigen Broschüre “Die brutale Seite der französischen Riviera” auf den Punkt gebracht. Die Aktivist:innen von Kesha Niya berichten, dass es bei den illegalen Push-Backs immer wieder zu Misshandlungen kommt, etwa durch den Einsatz von Pfefferspray und das Entwenden von Dokumenten und Kleidung. Es mangelt zudem an Schlafplätzen, Lebensmitteln und Gesundheitsversorgung. Außerdem werden Migrant:innen mittels racial profiling von der örtlichen Polizei kontrolliert. Nach der coronabedingten Schließung eines ohnehin schon überfüllten Camps des Roten Kreuzes, müssen derzeit noch mehr Menschen als sonst auf der Straße, an den Stränden, unter Brücken oder in verlassenen Häusern schlafen. Die Pandemie hat, wie in so vielen Bereichen, die bereits prekäre Situation flüchtender Menschen noch weiter zugespitzt. In Ventimiglia organisieren die Aktivist:innen von Kesha Niya für und mit den migrierenden Menschen eine Infrastruktur, die unter anderem ein tägliches Essensangebot und die Möglichkeit zum Aufladen von Mobiltelefonen einschließt. Eine der wichtigsten Tätigkeiten der Gruppe liegt außerdem im Bereitstellen von Informationen über informelle Dienste, die für Migrant:innen in der Stadt angeboten werden. Durch diese Tätigkeiten bauen die Aktivist:innen der Gruppe vielfach persönliche (Ver-)Bindungen und Vertrauen mit den Menschen auf. Schon in den kleinen Gesten des sich aufeinander Einlassens können so kurze Momente der Kollektivität aufblitzen, in den gemeinsamen Aktivitäten von Kochen und Essen können in präfigurativer Weise solidarisch-fürsorgliche Lebensformen ihren Anfang finden. In einem Comic über ihre eigenen Aktivitäten formuliert Kesha Niya den Anspruch, die Solidaritätstrukturen in dem Grenzgebiet kollektiv mit den Menschen in Migration zu organisieren und nicht für sie. Diese Beziehungen ermöglichen es wiederum, dass Bedürfnisse geäußert werden und das Wissen sowie eigene Erfahrungen geteilt werden können. Laut ihrer

What is the Black Mediterranean? Interview with Ida Danewid

Who lives? Who dies? Who cares? – Our leading questions reflect on the struggles of migrants in the Mediterranean. We spoke to political theorist Ida Danewid, author of the essay “White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the Erasure of History”. We wanted to understand how care can be entangled with paternalistic humanitarianism and racism. What do you think about the ships rescuing refugees in the Mediterranean? I don’t think that a focus on rescue missions alone is a particularly helpful starting point for understanding the socalled migrant ‘crisis’ in Europe. In my work I’ve argued that a narrow focus on the moment of rescue is problematic, because it often works to shut down questions about why it is that certain groups of people—and not others— end up shipwrecked at sea. A focus on the humanitarian dimensions of the migrant ‘crisis’ often sanctions a decontextualised and depoliticised narrative, which frames Europe as being some kind of innocent bystander. A better starting point, I think, is to situate the ‘crisis’ within the context of Europe’s long history of empire and racial capitalism. In the absence of such an analysis, a narrow focus on the ‘heroic’ act of rescue reproduces what Gloria Wekker calls ‘white innocence’. You propose the concept of the Black Mediterranean as a framework for this wider historical analysis. What is, then, the Black Mediterranean? The Black Mediterranean has been used by a variety of academics and organisers for quite some time now. It takes

inspiration from Paul Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic and adapts it to the Mediterranean in order to think about the long history of racialised domination, subordination, and resistance in this region. The Black Mediterranean enables us to make a conceptual leap, from talking about the migrant ‘crisis’ as being a crisis of humanitarianism—and a moment of exception—towards instead seeing it as a racial crisis, that is part of European normality. The Black Mediterranean is in that sense a counternarrative, and a way of shattering white innocence. It returns that which was erased: 500 years of European empire, racial capitalism, transatlantic and transmediterranean slavery, and the way in which it continues to structure Europe today. In The Black Atlantic, Modernity and Double Consciousness Paul Gilroy argues that there is a transnational Black culture all around the Atlantic: African, American and European at the same time. The strait of Gibraltar, where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean, is also a highly contested borderland. Is there a difference between the Black Atlantic and the Black Mediterranean or is it the same story? These histories are connected without being exactly the same. The enslavement trade, for example, began in the Mediterranean and was only later moved to the Atlantic. Countries like Spain and Italy have been central to colonial formations in both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The Atlantic and the Mediterranean have different colonial dynamics and structures of racialisation but, crucially, they are connected. engagée | 39

Tod im Gefängnis

Who Cares | 40

Wen kümmert‘s? Sonja John

Who lives, who dies, who cares? fragt diese Ausgabe von engagée. Dieser Artikel fragt: Wer ist besorgt über Menschen, die Inhaftierung nicht überleben? Wen kümmert’s?

Care

s stimmt zuversichtlich, wie viele Begriffe für das englische care im deutschen Wörterbuch aufgeführt werden. Sorgen, Fürsorge, pflegen, versorgen, Sorgearbeit, kümmern, Obhut, hüten, Fürsorglichkeit, Sorgfalt, Anteilnahme. Die Vielzahl von Entsprechungen lässt eine verlässliche Grundsubstanz, ein Fundament fürsorglicher Gemeinschaftlichkeit vermuten. Die deutsche Seele erscheint in ihrem Kern als eine solidarische, eine warme, eine hilfsbereite. Deutsche unterstützen sich. Sie gründen gemeinnützige Vereine, Initiativen und Solidaritätsgruppen, organisieren Sportveranstaltungen und Festivals. Das Grundgesetz garantiert Menschenwürde und die Gleichbehandlung vor dem Gesetz. So weit, so irreführend. Von einer anderen Warte aus betrachtet erscheint die Gesellschaft weniger fürsorglich. Wer in staatliche

Abhängigkeit gerät, kommt schwer wieder heraus. Ausnahmen bestätigen die Regel. Was ich hier formuliere, basiert auf rein subjektiven Beobachtungen und dem schmerzlichen Verlust von Angehörigen in staatlicher „Fürsorge“. „Care“-Leaver erleben auf ihrem Marsch durch die „Pflege“-Institutionen oft Vernachlässigung, Gewalt, Demütigung und Ausbeutung. Konflikte mit dem Gesetz sind vorprogrammiert. Im Gefängnis präsentiert sich Deutschland weiterhin als eine Ausschlussgesellschaft, die abweichendes Verhalten nicht toleriert. Ohne Zweifel hat sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten im Hinblick auf freie und selbstbestimmte Lebensweisen viel getan. „Anders“ Glaubende und Liebende werden nicht mehr kriminalisiert oder gar vernichtet. Frauen haben mehr Selbstbestimmung über ihr Leben und ihren Körper erkämpft. Jedoch wird divergierendes Verhalten weiterhin sanktioniert, verurteilt und bestraft. Verurteilte Menschen verlieren scheinbar jeglichen Anspruch auf Mitleid, Mitgefühl und Miteinander. Was Peggy Parnass vor 40

Jahren in ihrer Berichterstattung über Gerichtsprozesse schilderte, gilt immer noch: Die Klassenjustiz kriminalisiert Armut und verurteilt Angeklagte desto gnadenloser, je prekärer sie sind, während altehrwürdige kriminelle Familienclans strafrechtlich kaum belangt werden.1 Vor Gericht landen nahezu nur Prekäre; solche, die wenig Zuwendung und Fürsorge empfangen. Hier hört man immer wieder die gleichen Geschichten über einen Mangel an Geld, Sicherheit und Möglichkeiten. Sofern überhaupt nach dem Hintergrund gefragt wird. Wen kümmert’s? Das Gros der Inhaftierten kommt aus drei – sich teils überschneidenden – Gruppen: Arme, Drogenabhängige und psychisch Kranke, teils mit Migrationsgeschichte. Die Lebenssituation resultiert häufig aus einer Reihe von Vernachlässigungen. Bringt das Gefängnis die Wende? Wird ihnen dort mit „resozialisierenden“ Maßnahmen geholfen? Werden sie achtsam behandelt, unterstützt, umsorgt? Oder werden sie gedemütigt und gebrochen? Kümmert es 1 Vgl. Parnass, Peggy (1992): Prozesse. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Vgl. auch die Serie „Deutschlands brutalste Familienclans“ in Lower Class Magazine 2020 und 2021.

jemanden, wenn sie dort verkümmern? Zahlen des Europäischen Rates und des Statistischen Bundesamtes belegen, dass in deutschen Gefängnissen seit Dekaden durchschnittlich 180 Menschen pro Jahr sterben, von denen 48 Prozent der Lebensmut verlässt („Suizid“).2 Das ist ein Problem. Menschen auszusortieren, einzusperren, zu foltern und zu vernichten war bekanntlich die Spezialität dieses Landes. Aber das sollte der Vergangenheit angehören. Jetzt spielt Deutschland in der Demokratie-Oberliga, ratifizierte die Charta der Menschenrechte und die Nelson-Mandela-Regeln der Vereinten Nationen zur Behandlung von Gefangenen. Auch Verurteilte sind demnach menschenwürdig zu behandeln. Nimmt der Staat Menschen ihre Freiheit und sperrt sie ein, übernimmt er die Fürsorgepflicht und tritt in die Garantenstellung: Er hat für ihr Wohlergehen zu garantieren. 2 Deutscher Bundestag (2019): Drucksache 19/2872: Todesfälle in Haft, Polizeigewahrsam und Sicherungsverwahrung. Köln: Bundesanzeiger Verlag; Aebi, Marcelo F./ Tiago, Mélanie M. (2021): Prison Populations. SPACE I 2020 Strasbourg: Space Council of Europe Annual Penal Statistics, S. 113.

Career

irekt unter care wird im Wörterbuch der Begriff career geführt. Wenn auch etymologisch nicht verbunden, wirkt sich care doch auf Karrieren aus. Denn die Gitterstäbe markieren nicht nur Territorien von Freiheit und Unfreiheit. Sie kennzeichnen auch klare Grenzen zwischen parallelen Welten, die durch eklatant ungleiche Zugänge zu care entstehen. Hüben Privilegierte, drüben Marginalisierte. Fast jede Knastkarriere lässt sich auf Fürsorge-Deprivation zurückführen. Auf der anderen Seiten schaffen Investition in Nachhilfe, Lernmaterialien, Bildungsreisen, Zeit und Nerven für Lehrer:innengespräche, die Basis für schulischen Erfolg. Papis* Kontakte, Fürsprache, Netzwerke und Kreditkarten tun ihr übriges und glätten den Übergang ins Erwerbsleben. Das zu erwartende Erbe löst einige Probleme, bevor sie bei Anderen entstehen. Weich und warm in Fürsorgesystemen gebettet erhält sich der intergenerationale Wohlstand, verabschiedet Gesetze zu seiner Sicherung und kontrolliert die Institutionen der Herrschaft zur

Sicherung des Status quo. Jedoch besteht die stete Gefängnispopulation von über 60.000 Insass:innen nicht parallel, sondern im systemstabilisierenden Ausbeutungszusammenhang. Zudem schafft die Strafjustiz Arbeitsplätze und ermöglicht Karrieren direkt im Gefängnis und in den weiteren Institutionen der Disziplinargesellschaft. Die Moneten verdienen sich die Einen mit der Misere der Anderen. Als Staats- oder Rechtsanwält:innen, Richter:innen, Anstaltsärzt:innen, Psycholog:innen, Sozialarbeiter:innen oder Schließer:innen beteiligen sie sich direkt an der Ausschließung der Anderen. Sie selbst sind versorgt. Die Strafjustiz ist ein Wirtschaftszweig, eine Industrie. Das Personal verfügt über sichere Arbeitsplätze – in aller Regel sind sie verbeamtet. Außerhalb der Mauern verkaufen Journalist:innen die Geschichten der Anderen. Therapeut:innen, Coaches und Bewährungshelfer:innen geht die Arbeit mit den produzierten Rückfälligen nicht aus. Immer neue Vereine wollen Gefangene „resozialisieren“ und schaffen zunächst sich selbst eigene bezahlte engagée | 41

Stellen in der großen Kerkergesellschaft. Mitarbeiter:innen der Justizvollzugsanstalten müssen sich um ihre eigene finanzielle Versorgung keine Sorgen machen. Rechtlich gesehen sollten sie allerdings die Menschen in ihrer Obhut behüten. Sie sind für das Wohlergehen und das Überleben der Insass:innen verantwortlich. Die physische und psychische Situation soll gewahrt und möglichst verbessert werden. Psycholog:innen, Ärzt:innen, Sozialarbeiter:innen, Sachbearbeiter:innen und Seelsorger:innen werden aus Steuergeldern dafür bezahlt, sich um die ihnen Anvertrauten zu kümmern. Geschieht das in ausreichendem Maße? Und was sagt die Bevölkerung dazu, in deren Namen die Betroffenen letztendlich verurteilt werden? Gesellschaftlich wurde über Tod im Gefängnis das letzte Mal breit diskutiert, als sich RAF-Gefangene durch Hungerstreik gegen beschädigende oder gar vernichtende Haftbedingungen in Einzel- und Totalisolation der „toten Trakte“ wehrten.3 Sie forderten Kommunikationsmöglichkeiten und Zusammenlegung. Der Entzug von Kommunikation und Gemeinschaft − wie von den RAF-Gefangenen beanstandet und laut Nelson-Mandela-Gefängnis-Regeln Mindestrechte − verletzt die Menschenrechte, schädigt die Gesundheit und produziert „Suizid“.4 Viele Inhaftierte kommen mit dem Freiheitsentzug nicht gut zurecht. Manche sind auf kaltem Entzug, vermissen ihr soziales Umfeld oder ihnen wird medizinische Versorgung verwehrt. Verhaltensauffällige, widerständige und eigenwillige Inhaftierte, die nicht parieren, erhalten nicht Fürsorge, Anteilnahme und Pflege, sondern sie werden noch weiter bestraft und isoliert. In den besonders gesicherten Haftraum werden jene gesperrt, die für sich oder andere eine Gefahr darstellen. In der Presse wurde über die Praxis der Einzelisolation berichtet, als sich der als suizidgefährdet eingestufte Manager Thomas Middelhoff über die regelmäßigen Lebendkontrollen beschwerte. Bei ihm wurden sie immerhin ordnungsgemäß durchgeführt. Bei den Anderen wird häufig nicht geschaut; deren Tod wird morgens protokolliert, wenn es für Wiederbelebung zu spät ist. Judith Butler hat festgestellt, dass Menschenleben unterschiedlich viel zählen und nicht alle als betrauernswert gelten – When is life grievable?5

3 Vgl. Schulz, Jan-Hendrik (2019): Unbeugsam hinter Gittern. Die Hungerstreiks der RAF nach dem Deutschen Herbst. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, S. 223. 4 UNODC Büro der Vereinten Nationen für Drogen- und Verbrechensbekämpfung (2015): Mindestgrundsätze der Vereinten Nationen für die Behandlung der Gefangenen (Nelson-Mandela-Regeln). Resolution 70/175 der Generalversammlung, verabschiedet am 17. Dezember 2015. Vienna International Centre; Herring, Tiana (2020): The Research is Clear: Solitary Confinement causes long-lasting harm. https://www.prisonpolicy. org/blog/2020/12/08/solitary_symposium – Zugriff am 10.05.2021. 5 Butler, Judith (2009): Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? New York: Verso, S. 24.

Cargo

er alphabetisch auf career folgende Begriff im Wörterbuch lautet cargo. Dieses Wort trifft die Massenabfertigung im Gefängnis ganz gut. Cargo bezeichnet eine zu transportierende Warenladung. Die Waren werden in einen dunklen, verschlossenen Kasten gesperrt und später – zu spät? – entladen. Das hinterlässt Spuren. Bei dem industriellen Verfahren kommt es häufig zu Beschädigungen. Für Schäden an Waren wird immerhin der Lieferant in Regress genommen. Für Inhaftierte heißt es jedoch nicht handle with care. Bei gesundheitlichen Folgeschäden oder Todesfällen in staatlicher Obhut, wenn die Institution ihre Fürsorgepflicht und Garantenstellung verletzt, folgt weder Untersuchung, Rechenschaft, Verantwortung, Konsequenzen oder eine Entschuldigung. Die Angehörigen werden mit dem Tod alleine gelassen, insbesondere, wenn sie sich nicht politisch links oder rechts positionieren und auf eine Migrationsgeschichte reduzieren lassen wollen. Die Nachfrage ergab: Amnesty International fühlt sich nicht zuständig. Opferstellen seien für Opfer da, nicht für verurteilte Täter. Eine Beschwerdestelle für Todesfälle in Haft gibt es nicht; das seien ja Einzelfälle. Strafrechtlich gäbe es keine Erfolgschancen, die Justiz zu verklagen. Die Telefonseelsorge eröffnete 2020 neue Gruppen für Angehörige von Suizidopfern, aber die Erlebnisse von in Haft Verstorbenen seien den Teilnehmenden nicht zuzumuten. Politisch lässt sich kaum um das Thema organisieren. Was soziale Gefangene vor vierzig Jahren feststellten, trifft heute noch zu: Selbst die Linke reagiert zwar mitunter stark emotional auf Todesfälle in Haft, bleibt aber in Bezug auf Gefängnisrealitäten ziemlich uninformiert und verhindert durch selektive Solidarisierungen letztendlich weiterführende gesellschaftliche Diskussionen über das Gefängnis.6

Feminist:innen haben festgehalten, dass Sorgearbeit und Fürsorge in der Gesellschaft sehr ungleich verteilt sind. Würde Sorgearbeit fair aufgeteilt, und würde Fürsorge breit ausgeteilt, hätten mehr Menschen bessere Möglichkeit zur gesellschaftlichen Teilhabe. Fürsorglicher Umgang mit allen wäre eine Investition in gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt. In Möglichkeitsstrukturen von realer Einigkeit, Gleichberechtigung und Freiheiten gibt es kaum Kriminalisierung. Das Gefängnis wird üblicherweise als eine Randerscheinung der Gesellschaft gesehen. Dabei ist das Gefängnis der Ausdruck und das Resultat gesellschaftlicher Verhältnisse und Prozesse. Das Gefängnis – inklusive seiner Haftbedingungen – spiegelt die gesellschaftliche Seele wider.

6 Vgl. Schulz, Jan-Hendrik (2019): Unbeugsam hinter Gittern, S. 196.

24h Betreuer:innen in Zeiten von Corona Gedächtnisprotokoll einer Aktivist:in

Carina Maier

## Montag, 11. Mai 2020 5:30 Ich fahre zum Flughafen Wien Schwechat, weil der erste Zug aus Rumänien mit 24h-Betreuer:innen seit den Corona-Einschränkungen ankommt. Ich möchte sie gemeinsam mit Aktivist:innen der IG-24, der selbstorganisierten Interessensvertretung der rumänisch- und slowakischsprachigen 24h Betreuer:innen in Österreich, willkommen heißen. Trotz meines Wissens, dass soziale Reproduktion in dieser kapitalistischen Gesellschaft notwendigerweise permanent abgewertet wird, fühlt sich dieser Import „billiger Arbeitskräfte“ am Flughafen Wien in der aktuellen Situation besonders perfide an. In Österreich sind ca. 60.000 24hBetreuer:innen tätig – mehr als 90 Prozent davon sind migrantische Frauen aus osteuropäischen Ländern. Die 24hBetreuer:innen arbeiten als Ein-Personen-Unternehmen, sind jedoch meist nur scheinselbstständig und erhalten ihre Anstellung über Vermittlungsagenturen, von denen es in Österreich mehr als 900 gibt. Ihre Arbeitsverträge sind in den meisten Fällen nicht in ihrer Erstsprache verfasst, von Rücksicht auf arbeitsrecht-

liche Errungenschaften hierzulande ganz zu schweigen. Die Betreuer:innen sehen sich mit rassistischen Gesetzgebungen konfrontiert, wie beispielsweise der Indexierung der Familienbeihilfe. Für Drittstaatsangehörige wird nun die Familienbeihilfe an den jeweiligen nationalen Kontext angepasst in dem die Familie der Betreuer:in lebt. Im Falle von Rumänien bedeute die Indexierung eine Kürzung der Beihilfe um die Hälfte und erschwert oder verunmöglicht so die Versorgung der Familien. ## 5:52 Die Stimmung ist irritierend. Der Flughafen, die Zwischenzone, der Nicht-Ort, der Transitraum. Aktuell befinden sich hier keine Reisenden. Nur Politiker:innen, Journalist:innen und eine Menge Polizei und Sicherheitspersonal. Der Bahnsteig ist voll. Der Zug ist schon da. Langsam steigen nacheinander die Betreuer:innen aus dem Zug. Jede:r wird von Kameras abgeblitzt. Sie steigen akkordmäßig aus dem Zug, wie am Fließband. Die Blitzlichter der Presse fühlen sich voyeuristisch an. Informationsmaterialien zur Situation und ihren Rechten dürfen wir den Betreuer:innen nicht engagée | 43

N o avera t your ge ki tchen Lear

ning

from Valpa Carl r otta Tripp a

& Fe

aíso

rnan do S il

s a means to deepen understanding and enrich the evolving grammar on spatial systems of care, we looked at the distinct realities of two communal kitchens in Bologna, Italy and Valparaíso, Chile. These cities are familiar to both of us, being our respective places of origin. We’ve listened to each other talking about them many times during our friendship; on a usual-London-rainy-day, those conversations would be a therapeutic way to take care of each other and feel closer to our distant homes through our shared passion for collective urban life. We learnt from each other through differences, but mostly through uncanny similarities that led us to draw unexpected conclusions on the inevitable force of care.

and B

va L

ópez

ologn

Food as fundamental care

ood, as a necessary component of daily life, works as a foundation to allow a horizontal reading of societies and care distribution. Within vulnerable urban communities, unified efforts for food assistance exist as a fundamental infrastructure to sustain life and ensure its prosperity, often manifesting under the form of communal kitchens. Care, as the necessary practice of the uneventful, holds together the human and nonhuman bodies that compose such infrastructures; it circulates through formal and informal institutions, articulating spaces of solidarity through the provision of essential needs, feelings of affection, and principles of cooperation.

In both cities, popular kitchens have developed as a care infrastructure, constantly finetuning their efforts to solve the varied needs that may be required, demanding flexibility in their capacity for care provision, as was revealed with particular relevance during the Covid-19 pandemic. While facing these constant challenges, they rely on solidarity as the basic and common idea driving the infrastructure itself. Hence, through the very functioning of this infrastructure, based on the constant need to find new solutions to sustain itself, care is ceaselessly in expansion; but here lies the most valuable, and often overlooked, asset of care: this continuous and uneventful labour eventually gets past the provision of basic needs and enables the activation of unexpected additional spaces for opportunities, relations, connections, and aspirations to grow.

Choosing solidarity over charity

n comparing the two cases, it became evident how they reflect the different cultural contexts in which they’re embedded. For example, in Chile, ollas comunes [communal kitchens] have traditionally been deployed by marginal urban communities as a way to pool resources between different families to ensure food provision. This implies a strong capacity for organisation within a community, as they require division of labour, specialisation, and trust among members. Ollas comunes are strongly linked to tomas, informal land occupations conducted by organised groups of families. This is the case of La Palmera, Valparaíso, a neighbourhood that was originally a toma before acquiring legal status. Here is located the olla común ‘La Violeta’, which simultaneously provides a space for companionship and discussion, as well as visibility of a common struggle. The centre was founded 24 years ago as an educational space and started operating as an olla común during the winter of 2020, as local families struggled under the Covid-19 pandemic. The usual Italian tradition of charity is associated with the Catholic Church and provides a strong backbone for popular kitchens in the country, as they are understood to be a fundamental aspect of its dedication to the poor. This is essentially a vertical mode of operation, as the recipients are mostly left out of the day-to-day operations of the kitchen. Yet, in Bologna, a formal organisation called ‘Cucine Popolari’ [Popular

Kitchens] purposely reframed this tradition in order to provide food in a secular space managed by a soft hierarchical structure of volunteers, focused on solidarity rather than the religious concept of charity. The first communal kitchen opened in 2015 based on principles of mutual giving, in which recipients, donors, and volunteers are equal members. The kitchen space functions as a platform where relations can be activated and grow even outside the organisation. For example, years ago, a young Italian woman met a homeless family of Iranian refugees at the kitchen, and, after sharing a meal, offered them hospitality in her home. This encounter was the beginning of a cohabitation that lasted for months, ending only when the family found a secure job and a home of their own. Today, the Cucine Popolari manages three communal kitchens in the city, with the support of 250 volunteers in total, a network of private actors providing food supplies and the long-term objective of opening a venue in every neighbourhood of Bologna. While the Italian case aims to create a space of collaboration between different specialised actors, the Chilean one is focused on increasing the local autonomy of a secluded neighbourhood. In the Cucine Popolari, the robust social network of care allows young and senior citizens to freely provide their labour as a way of giving back to the community. In contrast, La Violeta presents an ad hoc network in which the caretakers are building the infrastructure themselves and providing for necessities not covered by formal means and falling outside the reach of institutions. However, in both cases, labour time is the basic unit to measure value, thus proposing, either consciously or subconsciously, a model of collective life that breaks the boundaries imposed by the capitalistic system of monetary trade. By contrasting or continuing traditional modes of solidarity, the levels of each infrastructure reveal the different aims of the two organisations, either as vertical and expansive or horizontal and concentrated. Both are able to spatialise care discourses and practices at different scales; from and beyond the materiality of the kitchen, there is a network with varying degrees of cooperation among very different and relevant urban actors; from the municipality offering a rent-free location to the Communal Kitchens, to the network of food suppliers donating raw ingredients to La Violeta. Thus, these infrastructures are nurtured by a wide diversity of relaengagée | 45

tions between formal urban institutions, different forms of volunteering and donations, and varied communities receiving support. The provision of care represents the anchor of this network and acts as a catalyst for the process of expansion of the infrastructure itself. Watcha cookin’

very Monday, the kitchen at La Violeta fires up again. Volunteers will spend the morning preparing around 150 meals, which will be served to neighbours who arrive at noon. The menu for today is cazuela, a traditional winter soup of chicken and vegetables. The ingredients come from diverse sources: some were delivered by the municipality, which is currently supporting ollas comunes in Valparaíso; others come from the network of local producers. But none of these sources is secure; volunteers acknowledge their instability and are devising plans to ensure their autonomy in the following months. The future community garden is one of these, planned as a space where food provision and holistic education can come together. Ollas comunes are essentially non-permanent, as the expectation is that neighbours will eventually overcome their current condition and regain their income. Thus, La Violeta aims to integrate the original educational project to the kitchen by providing daily meals to children assisting in class. This plan was decided by all permanent volunteers during their last meeting, as decisions about the centre are made collectively. But this plan requires cooperation with other institutions, something that is challenging even during normal times. The local health centre, the schools, and the municipality contribute sporadically, and college volunteers can’t visit due to the quarantine restrictions. The main challenge faced by La Violeta is to be seen within the wider urban scenario in order to solidify their important role in the community of La Palmera. On the opposite side of the globe, on a typical day at the Cucine Popolari, you will see homeless people, struggling individuals, and families of both immigrants and Italians in line waiting for lunch. The line is noisy as everyone talks and jokes around with each other and the volunteers. Someone complains about the menu, and it’s all taken in good humour. This jumble of subjectivities reflects the different invisiblised identities that exist at the margins of Bologna. Before the pandemic, you could find the most destitute people eating

for free right alongside more privileged citizens paying for the service, all enjoying each other’s company. The Cucine Popolari was created, weirdly enough, thanks to a wedding. Roberto Morgantini, the founder, married his partner to acquire the resources needed to open the first venue, using the traditional gift of money given to newlyweds. After seeing how necessary it was to provide Bologna with a secular space that would provide both food and recognition to invisiblised communities, he envisioned the Cucine Popolari as a kitchen where different urban groups could have lunch and interact with each other. He recalled the kitchen of his infancy as a place that was not just for cooking, but rather a continuation of the public space into the intimacy of the home, where everyone was welcome. Under current sanitary restrictions, the usual connections formed at the kitchen have disappeared, as the space is not accessible and only the most vulnerable are allowed to take away a lunch box, showing a card released by social services. The Covid-19 pandemic has increased the challenges, while the number of recipients doubled in size. This has required an additional effort in funds collection through media appearances and strategic alliances with local leaders and institutions, often creating friction within the organisation. Space for imagining

oth initiatives have built valuable knowledge in care provision by expanding their cultural legacies and recognising the slivers of opportunity present in each city. Several lessons can be drawn from them, particularly the horizontality and adaptability of La Violeta and the capacity of Cucine Popolari to create a democratic space for all citizens of Bologna. There will always be hurdles to jump over, and people will keep falling through the gaps of the infrastructure; yet the aim for autonomy manifests as a basis for solidarity and reflects the struggle of care infrastructures to enable space for imagining new solutions to reach stated goals and ensure the continuity of the network. Thus, the most valuable lesson is that care is never enough: it will always require expansion and improvement of these modes of expansion, unraveling a model of growth that is open, fertile, and generous in its spontaneity.

Solidarisch. Lernen. Junge Linke

olitik und soziale Initiativen sind dazu da, dem Gemeinwohl zu dienen, um nützlich zu sein für Menschen, um für viele einen Unterschied zum Besseren zu machen. Ein Satz, der wohl als Plattitüde ausgelegt werden kann, aber gleichzeitig enormes Potenzial birgt. Als unabhängige, linke Jugendorganisation (seit Sommer 2018) war für uns ab Stunde null klar, dass wir viele Menschen organisieren wollen, um gemeinsam an einer besseren Welt zu arbeiten und nicht Jahre später in elitärer Selbstbeschäftigung aufzuwachen. Eine Zielsetzung, die im ersten Moment nicht unglaublich utopisch oder unmöglich umsetzbar klingt. Doch politische Machtstrukturen in und rund um den österreichischen Staat machen es Organisationen ohne große finanzielle Mittel nicht gerade einfach, die dafür nötige Reichweite, Einfluss und somit auch Gehör zu bekommen. Nicht zuletzt war es der Schock der gerade beginnenden globalen Corona-Pandemie, der dazu führte, dass wir aus der Not heraus das Lernnetz, unser kostenloses Nachhilfenetzwerk, ins Leben riefen. Aber der Reihe nach: Die Idee eines sinn- und nutzenstiftenden Projekts entstand bereits im Sommer 2018, auf der Rückreise von unserer damals in Slowenien stattfindenden Bildungswoche “Sommerwerkstatt”. Der Rede von den Notwendigkeiten, Alltagsprobleme kollektiv zu bewältigen, wollten wir Taten folgen lassen. Schnell war klar, dass wir im Jugendverband vor allem im Bereich Bildung, Schule und Pädagogik die meiste Expertise hatten. Anfangs hatten wir mit der Sorge zu kämpfen, dass wir mit einem kostenlosen Nachhilfe-Angebot ohne große finanzielle Mittel und der nötigen Infrastruktur kaum über punktuelle Symptombekämpfung hinauskom-

men und damit am Grundproblem der verfehlten österreichischen Bildungspolitik nichts ändern würden. Erst mit Beginn des Jahres 2020 griffen wir die Idee erneut auf. Einer geplanten Protestform am Karlsplatz samt Tischen und Bänken für Nachhilfe im öffentlichen Raum erteilte schließlich der erste behördliche Corona-Lockdown in Österreich eine Absage. So absurd es klingen mag: Der Corona-Krise ist es wohl zu verdanken, dass wir unser Lernnetz starteten, zeigte doch das teils chaotisch organisierte Distance-Learning schnell und verschärft ökonomische und soziale Ungleichheiten auf. Bis heute lässt die Bildungspolitik um Minister Faßmann viele Schüler*innen und Eltern verzweifelt und hilflos zurück. Vielen Eltern wird mit den Pflichten des Berufslebens und der gleichzeitigen Kinderbetreuung viel abverlangt. Kinder haben mancherorts immer noch keinen Zugang zu einem Computer. Mehr denn je wurde sichtbar, dass Schulerfolg und Spaß am Lernen stark von der Geldbörse der Eltern abhängen. Das alles ließ uns erkennen, dass es eine Leerstelle gibt, die wir füllen können und wollen – und zwar mit kostenloser Online-Nachhilfe. Im April 2020 konnten wir dann schon erste Lernerfolge verbuchen. Vor allem konnten wir sämtlichen Schüler*innen, die sich vor ihrer Matura gemeldet hatten, positiv über diese Hürde begleiten. Im Nachhinein sind wir natürlich froh, dass wir auf viele unserer Mitglieder, unsere Strukturen und gut geordneten Abläufe im Verband zurückgreifen konnten. Ansonsten hätten wir nie mehreren Dutzend Schüler*innen zeitnah und gleichzeitig helfen können. Zugegeben, wir hätten uns nicht gedacht, dass unser Angebot über den ersten Lockdown hinaus dermaßen gefragt sein würde. Im Herbst beschlossen wir schließlich, engagée | 47

Who Cares | 48

unser Team zu vergrößern und nun sukzessive an der Ausweitung unserer Ressourcen zu arbeiten. Es war jedenfalls notwendig, da uns unsere lokalen Kampagnen in Spitzenzeiten zwischen 20 und 25 Anmeldungen pro Tag brachten. Mit dem Lernnetz können wir natürlich nicht das Versagen der Bundesregierung und der Bildungspolitik im Speziellen kompensieren. Die vielen, teilweise verzweifelten Anrufe und Anmeldungen, die wir bekommen, sind nur die Spitze des Eisbergs. Bereits vor der Pandemie benötigte jedes dritte Kind Nachhilfe. Laut einer Arbeiterkammer-Studie von 2019 geben Eltern österreichweit über 101 Millionen Euro pro Schuljahr für Nachhilfe aus. Diese Zahlen lassen keinen Zweifel daran, dass im Bereich Bildung strukturell vieles falsch läuft. Da wir in der Politik aktuell weit weg sind von linken Mehrheiten und der Möglichkeit auf ein fortschrittliches, gerechtes Schulsystem, haben wir uns gesagt: Wir werden selbst aktiv. Mit dem Lernnetz sagen wir den teuren Nachhilfe-Instituten den Kampf an. Demnach richtet sich unser Angebot in erster Linie an jene, die sich solche hochpreisigen Angebote nicht leisten können. Da wir im gesamten Projekt ehrenamtlich arbeiten, sind wir auf viele freiwillige NachhilfeGebende angewiesen. Wir arbeiten also viel mit Motivation und unentgeltlicher Honoration, was Wertschätzung und Gesprächskultur umso wichtiger macht. Und es funktioniert. Schnell hat sich ein Netzwerk aus Nachhilfe-Gebenden gebildet. Dabei versuchen wir im Lernnetz-Team im Bereich Administration sowie im Bereich unseres eigenen Schulungsangebots Zusammenhalt und Formen von commitment zu schaffen. Es läuft schließlich alles auf

den solidarischen Gedanken hinaus. Bei uns erleben Schüler*innen, dass es abseits von Individualisierung und Scheuklappen-Mentalität auch gemeinsam gehen kann – und das oft besser als allein. Diese Erfahrung kann ein wichtiger Unterschied sein, den wir als Linke für und mit Menschen machen wollen, indem wir konkret bei Alltagsproblemen weiterhelfen, uns gemeinsam organisieren und so auch Vertrauen gewinnen, was der österreichischen Linken aktuell u.a. bei Wahlen fehlt. Als Junge Linke arbeiten wir aber auch auf anderen Ebenen am Aufbau einer starken linken Partei in Österreich. Heute besteht unser Lernnetz aus über 500 Aktiven und wir wachsen täglich. Zuschriften, Mails und SMS, die uns täglich erreichen, geben uns Zuversicht. Jede einzelne Dankesnachricht und jede Benachrichtigung, dass Schüler:innen nach erhaltener Nachhilfe nun auch selbst in einem anderen Fach Nachhilfe geben und somit etwas zurückgeben wollen, sind ein wunderbarer Antrieb, täglich weiterzumachen und als gesamtes Projekt in gegenseitiger Solidarität zu wachsen. Diese Erfahrungen, die viele von uns gemacht haben, sind unglaublich wertvoll und geben Kraft. Denn Solidarität ist nie eine Einbahnstraße. Und: Wir wollen auch nach der Pandemie der Ort sein, wo wir uns gegenseitig helfen können. Dieser Ort soll nach der Pandemie aber auch tatsächlich ein physischer werden. In Wien soll unser erstes Lernnetz-Zentrum eröffnen, sobald es sicher und sinnvoll ist. Alle Schülerinnen und Schüler, die kostenlose Nachhilfe in Anspruch nehmen wollen und alle unter 30, die gerne Nachhilfe geben wollen, können sich jederzeit unter www.lernnetz.at melden. Nachhilfe-Einheiten finden aktuell online statt!

Rethinking housing as an infrastructure of care in violent realities

Claudia Hitzeroth & Camillo Boano

engagée | 49

Who Cares | 50

he concept of infrastructures of care has been used to describe relations and practices of care as urban infrastructures. Yassine, Al-Harithy, and Boano, for example, described refugees hosting other refugees in Ouzaii, Beirut as an infrastructure of care. While the concept initially referred to social infrastructures, Emma Power and Kathleen Mee recently defined housing as an infrastructure of care to analyze the Australian housing system in a way that encompassed not just physical housing structures but also actions, practices, and intentions of care encouraged or discouraged by the system. As urban practitioners questioning how violence and housing intersect in cities that are often touted as some of the ‘world’s most dangerous cities’ (in this case, South African cities), this piece makes the point that rethinking housing as an infrastructure of care is a way to resist perpetuated violence. The omnipresence of violence in cities is traumatic. Everyday violence, danger, crime, gender-based violence, and fear of physical harm shape a city, in that they shape urban practices and use of the urban environment: where we perceive we can and cannot go, how we move through the city and with whom, and so on. However, urban planning and the ‘intended city’ rarely speak to everyday violent realities. As such, David Satterthwaite’s concept of the ‘unintended city’ becomes a useful theoretical framework, as it portrays the city as one that is not intended (planned) for its urban majority. While Boano and Astolfo initially adopted the concept of unintended cities to reflect on Myanmar’s urbanization, in a South African context it brings attention to the multiple intentions at play in urban transformations as forms-of-violence reproduced despite the intentions of its dwellers, but also intentionally pursued by the government, the market, and the private sector in a historical continuum. In South Africa, these multiple intentions historically took the form of forced removals of the black urban population to the periphery, dispossession of land, violently enforced racial segregation, and the denial of the right to the city. In present-day, democratic South Afri-

ca, violence can still be perpetuated through housing despite its supposed intention of redress, as neighborhoods and urban landscapes created through state-led housing programs are marked by homogeneity, peripheral locations, fortification, and the absence of safe public spaces. In a country where citizenship is embodied by access to a brick house, marginalization is perpetuated and enforced through denial of the right to housing. Territories and peripheries are produced by deliberate and intentional acts, made possible by laws and discourses that construct exceptions and exceptionality. Informal settlement dwellers, land occupiers, building occupiers, and people experiencing homelessness are continually exposed to multiple and intersecting forms-of-violence by the government (shack demolitions and evictions), the market (gentrification and market-led evictions), and other city dwellers (xenophobic violence, gender-based violence, and gang violence). It lays bare that in such unintended cities, gangsterism, drug addiction, and everyday violence manifest as a way of living without opportunities. Yet now, as crime and violence penetrate the planned city, they have become unignorable, and violence prevention is increasingly planned in urban practice. Here, violence prevention is often planned through ‘strong and capable governance’, which depends on enforcement capacity, policing, and access to justice. However, current struggles against police brutality—such as the Nigerian #endSARS or South African #JusticeforCollinsKhosa and #JusticeForNathanielJulius—highlight that the punitive policing system is premised on continued violence solely by state-legitimized actors. Planning violence prevention and crime intervention without acknowledgement of the conditions that enable violent city realities, therefore, perpetuates violence rather than reducing it. It is important to realize that how we intervene in violence is dependent on how we understand it. The punitive justice system is rooted in a specific understanding of violence, which needs to be made explicit. Brad Evans expertly outlines how, in dominant discourse, difference is understood as the root cause of conflict and violence,

Recht auf Wohnen für alle! Obdachlosigkeit im Covid-Winter Initiative Sommerpaket

ngespannt ist die Situation im Dezember 2020 in Wien in den Quartieren des Winterpakets. Das Hauptproblem sind nach wie vor die Massenquartiere mit dichter Belegung. Schlafsäle, wo acht Menschen Platz finden müssen, sind keine Seltenheit. Nur ein einziges Quartier verfügt über Einzelzimmer. Trotz Beteuerungen der Verantwortlichen ist dort ein Abstandhalten nicht möglich. Ein Schutz vor Ansteckung ist nicht gegeben. Der CoronaCluster im Pavillon 8, eines der Quartiere des Winterpakets, ist eine logische Folge dieser Umstände. Es ist nur eine Frage der Zeit, bis es an unseren Arbeitsorten, an den Lebensmittelpunkten von hunderten von Menschen, zu weiteren Ausbrüchen kommt.

In Zeiten von geschlossenen Hotels wäre es leicht, Alternativen zu der Massenunterbringung zu finden – vielleicht sogar als erster Schritt für langfristige, menschliche Lösungen. Doch fehlender politischer Wille gepaart mit fehlender Voraussicht führen zu chaotischem und fahrlässigem Krisenmanagement. Leidtragende sind wir Basismitarbeiter_innen und nicht zuletzt unsere Klient_innen. Immerhin schloss der Fonds Soziales Wien (FSW) im Sommer die meisten Quartiere. Es wäre also genug Zeit für eine verantwortungsbewusste Planung gewesen. Selbst im Oktober, als die Temperaturen in der Nacht teilweise schon unter den Gefrierpunkt fielen, als die Zahlen der täglich Neuinfizierten neue Rekorde erreichten, als Teile der Einschulung aus Gründen des Pandemieschutzes ausfielen, blieben die Türen der meisten Quartiere noch geschlossen. engagée | 51

Derweil ist in den Einrichtungen wenig passiert. Wir kehrten in dieselben Häuser zurück, die in demselben desolaten Zustand waren, wie wir sie im Sommer verließen. Nur hier und da ist ein Bett verschwunden, um zumindest den Anschein eines Hygienekonzepts zu erwecken. Tatsächlich hat sich auch durch die Umstellung auf einen 24-StundenBetrieb an den Räumlichkeiten wenig geändert. Adäquate Aufenthaltsräume fehlen. Es fehlt an Möglichkeiten zur sinnvollen Betätigung; ja, es fehlt teils sogar an ausreichend Sitzmöglichkeiten. De facto sind die Quartiere nur Aufbewahrungsanstalten, ganz egal ob sie 14 oder 24 Stunden offen sind.

ger Notbetten – also Betten, für die es keine institutionelle Zuweisung braucht, und über die die Quartiere für Notfälle selbst verfügen können. Auf die wenigen Betten in diesen Unterkünften gibt es einen immensen Andrang. Basismitarbeiter_innen aus den betroffenen Einrichtungen erzählen, dass sie sich in manchen Diensten mehr als Türsteher_innen denn als Unterstützende fühlen. Anstatt Obdachlosen zu helfen, müssen sie sie auf die Straße setzen – und das nur aus Platzmangel. Gerade an diesem Beispiel wird wieder mal sichtbar, wie sehr die Planung bzw. die Nicht-Planung an den Bedürfnissen der Betroffenen vorbei geht.

Als wir in den ersten Wochen von einem Ausfall der Heizung in diesem Quartier hörten, von einem Befall mit Bettwanzen in jener Einrichtung oder von dem Schimmel, der bereits seit einem halben Jahr in den Duschen eines anderen Hauses wucherte, waren wir wenig überrascht. Es ist etwas, das wir aus den vergangenen Jahren kennen, und das unmittelbar mit der prekären, kurzfristigen Planung des Winterpakets zu tun hat. Unter diesen Umständen lassen sich diese kurzfristigen Unterbringungen nur in Gebäuden realisieren, wo der kapitalistische Verwertungsdruck nicht ganz so hoch ist – und die sind nun mal nicht im besten Zustand. Investitionen zahlen sich auch nicht aus – denn wer weiß, was nächstes Jahr sein wird?

Ein weiteres Problem ist der Personalmangel. Dieser ist prinzipiell schon aus den letzten Jahren bekannt. Schon bei der Planung werden scheinbar Überstunden und Unterbesetzungen miteingerechnet. Die daraus folgende Überbelastung und die damit einhergehende Burnout-Gefahr, die es genauso in anderen Bereichen der Sozialen Arbeit gibt, waren ein wesentlicher Motor der Streikbewegung Anfang 2020. Nur diese Saison ist noch schlimmer. Da viele Basismitarbeiter_innen berechtigt Angst haben, andere anzustecken, bleiben sie, anders als die Jahre zuvor bei geringen Symptomen Zuhause. Zum Teil gibt es auch explizite Anweisungen, sich bei den kleinsten Anzeichen auf eine Coronainfektion testen zu lassen. Dieses Vorgehen ist auch sinnvoll. Das Problem ist nur: Es gibt keinen Ersatz. So gibt es schon jetzt, bereits einen Monat nach Beginn des Winterpakets, Quartiere, die an die Grenzen ihrer Belastbarkeit stoßen. Und eine Besserung ist nicht in Sicht.

Diese Dynamik, dieses Wechselspiel von fehlender langfristiger Planung und kapitalistischer Verwertungslogik, führt auch zu einer Verdrängung der Quartiere, und damit auch der Obdachlosen aus der Stadt. Dieses Jahr schloss mit dem NQ Apollogasse das letzte Quartier in den inneren Bezirken (IIX). Mensch muss sich das vorstellen: Innerhalb des Gürtels wohnen fast eine Million Menschen. Hier gibt es aber nur noch zwei Notunterkünfte: das FrauenWohnZentrum mit 32 Plätzen und die Gruft mit 60 Plätzen. Das sind weniger als 0,01% der Betten. Die meisten Quartiere, vor allem jene des Winterpakets, sind irgendwo am Stadtrand. Wo für gesunde Menschen nach Erreichen der Straßenbahn-Endhaltestelle noch ein Fußmarsch von 10-15 Minuten wartet; für Kranke dauert er dementsprechend länger. Auch so kann Obdachlosigkeit strukturell unsichtbar gemacht werden. Diese Verdrängung an den Stadtrand bringt aber auch für die wenigen noch einigermaßen gut zu erreichenden Einrichtungen Probleme mit sich. Diese Saison gibt es coronabedingt deutlich weni-

Eine wesentliche Wurzel der geschilderten Probleme liegt in der marginalisierten Stellung von sogenannten nicht anspruchsberechtigten Obdachlosen in unserer Gesellschaft. Also obdachlosen Menschen, die keine Ansprüche auf Sozialhilfeleistungen haben. Sie sind so weit unten in der sozialen Hierarchie, dass über ihren Schutz während einer Pandemie genauso wenig nachgedacht wird, wie über ihre generellen Bedürfnisse in der Zeit darüber hinaus. Betroffen von dieser Ignoranz, wenn auch ganz anders, sind auch wir Basismitarbeiter_innen, die in den Massenquartieren arbeiten. Doch auch die Gesellschaft als Ganze ist betroffen, wenn soziale Netze so weit reißen, wenn Obdachlosigkeit in einem Ausmaß geschaffen wird, dass den Betroffenen nur ein Dach über dem Kopf und nur im Winter zusteht – und selbst das nur im besten Falle.

Observations on care disparity from the Covid-lockdown in the UK Johannes Lenhard & Eana Meng

t o N ll a less e l m a o u h e eq r a engagée | 53

don’t mind Covid, because I don’t go out. If I do, I put the face mask on, clean my hands, go out for 20 minutes, keep away from people, and come straight back. I’m lucky [...] I’ve got something to do to preoccupy myself. I make things [...] anything out of matchsticks. Since we’ve been locked down [I’ve been doing that] - take away half an hour after dinner, take 10 minutes away from a coffee. That’s 17, 18 hours a day.1

Tom2 was in his early fifties and had been in and out of homeless support organisations - from short-term housing to the street and back - for years; when Covid-19 hit and the first UK lockdown was announced, his life didn’t change too much. While Tom was considered to be an ‘entrenched rough sleeper’, i.e., someone who circled in and out of homelessness over a long stretch of time, he was also a quiet loner who didn’t take drugs regularly (anymore). In fact, Covid-19 has, broadly, had some unexpectedly positive effects on people experiencing homelessness in the UK; while providing housing for people sleeping rough was initially justified by general public health concerns (e.g., the fear that people experiencing homelessness could spread Covid-19 further), it has had a surprisingly positive impact3 on recipients. Over 14,500 people were housed following lockdown restrictions in March 2020, and the government announced a £433m plan to ensure 6,000 new long-term housing units. The umbrella of care - for both housing and certain kinds of housing and ben1 This article is based on several months of ethnographic fieldwork in support institutions for people experiencing homelessness in the UK and on a dozen interviews with service providers and homeless people between April 2020 and February 2021. 2 All names are anonymised to protect our interlocutors. 3 “Coronavirus: Thousands of Homeless ‘Back on Streets by July’.” BBC News. BBC, June 4, 2020. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52915913.

efit support, for instance - was at least temporarily expanded and people ‘became engaged’ with support organisations that had often been ‘entrenched’ and outside of care. For many, perhaps the majority of people experiencing homelessness and sleeping rough, efforts such as the ‘Everyone In’4 campaign providing the funding for both emergency (hotel) accommodation and longer-term housing and support had ongoing positive effects in terms of wellbeing, health, and stability. Naturally, certain questions returned again and again: How long will government funding last? Will they really be able to house everyone, or will people be sent to the streets? Now, with the third lockdown slowly coming to an end, these fears are resurfacing, but both service providers and local governments have already made tremendous progress5 with offering many people long-term housing. However, certain cracks in this positive development already appeared last summer during our research; protecting the majority of a highly vulnerable, and in many ways marginalised, group can be dangerous, if not fatal for certain sub-groups with specific needs. Many homeless people suffer from what is widely called ‘complex needs’ involving addiction problems and mental health issues. Estimates vary, but we can assume that, particularly among people sleeping rough, the majority (~60%) falls into this group

4 “£105 Million to Keep Rough Sleepers Safe and off the Streets during Coronavirus Pandemic.” GOV.UK. Accessed April 23, 2021. https:// www.gov.uk/government/news/105-million-tokeep-rough-sleepers-safe-and-off-the-streetsduring-coronavirus-pandemic. 5 Lenhard, Johannes. “Lockdown Has Shown That the UK Can Solve Its Homelessness Crisis – If There Is Sufficient Funding.” Prospect Magazine. Prospect Magazine, February 12, 2021. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ politics/coronavirus-lockdown-investment-pandemic-rough-sleepers.

(Mental Health Foundation6). During Covid lockdowns, those living with addiction and mental health conditions were put under increased pressure on a number of axes, and weren’t able to access necessary care. Take Sam’s experience as an example. Early in the first lockdown, Sam had received a large cheque from a Department for Work and Pension back-payment; in late May, he suddenly found himself with several thousand pounds on his hands, locked in his small hostel room. While he was on the way out to longer-term housing - everyone was just waiting for restrictions to ease to move people along - he had been continuously struggling with crack and heroin use. With the sudden influx of money and increased anxiety, drugs were a welcome way to pass the time. Sam proudly describes one of his tricks to get around lockdown restrictions in order to spend days in his room secretly injecting and smoking: he would use a piece of string to exchange money for drugs out of his window to the main street. Unlike Tom, people like Sam were heavily dependent on accessing drugs, at least partly to self-medicate their mental health issues. While many would usually earn the necessary money to top up their benefits with begging, this was made doubly complicated during lockdowns. On the one hand, people were not allowed outside for more than an hour in some institutions, which put enormous pressure on them to make money quickly; on the other hand, the amount of pedestrians on the high streets - usually the main target to get donations - was drastically reduced. As a result, money was very hard to come by; transgressing (institutional) lockdown rules was often a necessity. On top of that, dealers 6 “Mental Health Statistics: Homelessness.” Mental Health Foundation, January 16, 2020. https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/statistics/ mental-health-statistics-homelessness.

A pbroader ubl ic?

On the urban-digital nexus of care networks Maria Reitano

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Data-Cleaning On the Marginalisation of Digital Reproductive Labour

Manischa Eichwalder

Please animate the zebra by expressing with your face the following emotion for at least 10 seconds: surprise – payment: $0.35.”1

n the summer of 2020, ethics researcher Timnit Gebru was fired by Google because of her latest survey that once again revealed the racist and sexist biases of facial recognition software programs. Meanwhile, millions of gig workers around the world are working precariously at subsistence levels to maintain the digital infrastructure of these software programs. As different as these examples are, they convey the message: caring about data means being marginalised. While Gebru received global attention and support for her work because of her exceptional achievements in scientific research, the efforts of gig workers remain invisible. Apparently, it is not on the sexy side of digitisation that deserves social approval. But why is such substantial work, which systematically keeps artificial intelligence (AI) running, made invisible? What is this work about, and how does it look? 1 Elisa Giardina Papa: Cleaning Emotional Labor (2020); find a documentary on this work on elisagiardinapapa.org

The short answer is as banal as it is indicative of capitalist logic, such as casualisation of reproductive labour: by being labelled cleaning, data maintenance work is easily downgraded to a sphere at the margins of global tech capitalism, ready to be outsourced to precarious workers in the global south. Apparently, dominant mechanisms of disclaiming reproductive work as labour are still at play, allowing double standards to be applied and continuing the exploitation of people strategically marked as the Other. But if we take a closer look at this kind of work, we not only get an insight into the violent logic of Othering that characterises the formal framework of this labour, as well as the process of data maintenance itself; we also see how little it actually has to do with cleaning at all. In her video installation Cleaning Emotional Data (2020), artist Elisa Giardina Papa engages deeply with questions regarding the human infrastructure of AI by researching affective computing systems, experiencing the work itself and making it visible. To do so, she hires at so-called humanin-the-loop companies, which provide clean datasets

made for the training of Artificial Intelligences, rendering them capable of recognising human faces and emotions. In the videos, Papa presents her research insights into the logics of automated face- and emotion-recognition, as well as some tasks she did for the companies. The images and texts are displayed in a lo-fi way: one can see scans from books, plain slides with some contextual notes on them, and the filmed computer screen, which shows how the artist is doing the tasks online. Each video is shown on a monitor standing on the floor, accompanied by a rectangular textile piece which looks like a privacy screen from copy shops or cube farms. Being fragmented and sketchily put together, this presentation of content is already quite revealing for the mode of understanding the data-cleaning: one can see that it is about a precarious online job, but it always somehow stays blackboxed, intransparent, and abstruse. In Papa’s videos we see that the tasks of data-cleaning consist of so-called HITS (human intelligence tasks) which require labelling, annotating, and categorising various digital images. Payment ranges from $0.15 to $1 per task, and each one is

described in English, additionally translated into Spanish, Arabic, and Filipino. The tasks all focus on human emotions: one, for example, requires the rating of a given set of images of people’s faces by their degree of fear, sadness, anger, and disgust; another asks the worker to perform certain emotions in front of the camera to animate emoji animals. While performing the tasks one after another, most of the time we can only see the cursor of Papa’s computer mouse, guiding us click by click, to which the whole working performance seems to be reduced. But in fact, this job contains the affective work of literally making sense, supplying the data with intelligible meaning by transferring human emotions in some highly abstracted way onto the data. Not only do the yet-to-be-animated emojis tell us that there is no emotion already depicted in the dataset, but also that the people’s faces don’t really match any kind of human emotion. That’s because they are so-called eigenfaces, analytical images composed of pixels from a million different digital portraits. As they don’t actually depict a real face, but some kind of categorised facial feature, they aim to be read by a machine, invisible to the human eye.

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AMBIVALENT Notes on the idea of therapeutic urban planning in times of far-right mobilisation Gala Nettelbladt

HEALING

Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion. bell hooks, 2000, p.215

he global resurgence of farright movements has bolstered themes such as national regression, a racialised imagination of ‘the people’ and authoritarian rule. Amidst this political current, the idea of therapeutic planning is gaining new prominence in urban studies. Centred on an understanding aof urban planning as community-making, it calls for the emotional involvement of people in urban development processes in order to provide grounds for healing in divided communities. In doing so, it echoes academic and media commentators in Europe and the United States who have outlined how the contemporary moment of authoritarian regression is rooted in multiple and often overlapping societal divisions1 and narratives regarding the need for healing in the face of polarised and fractured societies.2

In German cities for example, therapeutic planning takes the form of public citizens’ dialogues, which municipalities across the country introduced to respond to far-right rallies, which have drastically increased since the long summer of migration in 2015. These forums are designed to create a space for residents’ worries and fears in the face of a growing plu1 rich vs. poor, winners vs. losers of globalisation, urban vs. rural spaces, liberals vs. conservatives, exclusive vs. Inclusive solidarities, anti-democratic vs. attitudes, men vs. women, racists vs. antiracists. 2 e.g. Molenberghs, P. (2016). Here’s what science says about populism, the rise of Donald Trump, and how to heal a fractured country. In: The Conversation, November 4 2016.

ral urban order.3 In the United States, the National League of Cities (NLC) launched an initiative intended for cities to ‘create opportunities for racial healing’.4 These encompass the formation of local committees and task force panels aimed at discussing the racial tensions and racist pasts of cities, while explicitly encouraging the emotional participation of their residents.5 These programmes promise an alleviating effect and are portrayed as a kind of local remedy to societal injustices and inequalities. Comprehending healing as a central dimension of the feminist notion of care, I want to use this essay to engage a critical reading of this narrative. Attending to the importance of interdependence the feminist perspective offers, I want to advance an understanding of healing that also reveals the ambivalences the metaphor holds. I argue that all too often the narrative of healing implicitly entails a kind of “going back to normal”, like a sick body that recovers. This “normal”, however, was never healthy. The urban conditions and roots of far-right mobilisation go back to long-stand3 Deutsches Institut für Urbanistik (2019). Bürgerdialog in Zeiten aufgeheizter Debatten. Retrieved from: https://difu.de/ veranstaltungen/2019-12-12/buergerdialog-in-zeiten-aufgeheizter-debatten 4 National League of Cities (2018). How cities are creating opportunities for racial healing. Retrieved from: https://www.nlc. org/article/2018/12/20/how-cities-are-creating-opportunities-for-racial-healing/ 5 Contreras, R. (2020). Cities creating racial ‘healing’ committees to confront past. In: ABC News, September 19 2020.

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Contributors Niyousha Bastani is a PhD candidate at the Department of Politics & International Studies, University of Cambridge, where she researches ideas of liberal education, race, and care in counter-extremist UK. She is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC- Canada) doctoral fellow, and Features Editor at the Cambridge Review of International Affairs. She tweets @bniyoush Jasmin Behrends studiert Internationale Beziehungen und Friedens- und Konfliktforschung an der Goethe Universität in Frankfurt am Main und beschäftigt sich hier besonders mit dem Thema Flucht und Migration. Camillo Boano is Professor of Urban Design and Critical Theory at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL, where he is also the codirector of the UCL Urban Laboratory. At Politecnico di Torino he is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design. Amy Clark is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Kent. Their research focus is in radical futures, particularly researching queer and feminist world-building and practices of care. Amy is based in London and currently organises with London Renters Union and Channel Rescue. Zuzanna Czebatul lives and works in Berlin. The structures and aesthetics of power embedded in political ideologies form the core of Zuzanna’s work, which examines power relations through artifacts and decor. As a sculptor, Czebatul concentrates on the visual seductiveness

of contemporary and archaic objects and architectural elements, as well as the language of interior and graphic design. This year her works will be included in group exhibitions at Museum Morsbroich; Baltic Triennale; Berlinische Galerie and Athens Biennale. Ida Danewid is a social and political theorist interested in postcolonial theory, Marxism, and interconnected histories of raced, sexed, carceral, and ecological violence. A central strand of her work focuses on transnational movements, anti-colonial internationalisms, and revolutionary struggles against racial capitalism and the many afterlives of colonialism. Ida is Lecturer in Gender and Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation at UCL. Flannán Delaney lives in East London. They are a member of Plan C and a healthcare worker. Emma Dowling is a sociologist and political economist currently based at the University of Vienna, having previously held positions at universities in Germany and the United Kingdom. Her research interests include social change, feminist political economy and emotions and work. Her book The Care Crisis – What Cause It and How Can We End It? (2021) is published by Verso (London/New York). Manischa Eichwalder has fun looking at contemporary art, thinking, talking, and writing about it. She studied philosophy and cultural

studies and now studies contemporary art history. During her BA she worked as a curatorial assistant at Museum Folkwang and was managing the art education program at Urbane Künste Ruhr afterwards. Manischa is one of the founders of the anarcha-feminist curator and DJ collective FAM_ which among others has been working with Volksbühne Berlin, PACT Zollverein, Ruine München or Radio 80000. Elizabeth Fetterolf is a sociology graduate student at the University of Oxford. Their current research focuses on AI, anthropomorphism, and social reproduction theory. At the moment, they are living in Brooklyn with five lovely roommates and one ornery cat. Eleri Fowler writes on gendered labour, care and social reproduction. Her work has previously appeared in Blind Field Journal, SPAM and Notes from Below. Jule Govrin forscht an der Schnittstelle von Sozialphilosophie Feministischer Politischer Philosophie und Ästhetik. Sie ist Autorin von u.a. Begehren und Ökonomie. Eine sozialphilosophische Studie (2020). Nebenbei ist sie journalistisch tätig, z.B. bei ZEIT Online. Claudia Hitzeroth is a South African urban scholar currently working in the NGO sector on affordable housing and the spatial transformation of South African cities. She completed her MSc at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL, last year. This piece is a continuation of thinking she developed while writing up her thesis, under the guidance of Camillo Boano.

Dr. Sonja John researches police accountability mechanisms at HWR Berlin. From 2015-2019 she was assistant professor for Political Science in Ethiopia. She received her degrees in Lakota Leadership and Management from Oglala Lakota College and in Political Science from Freie Universität Berlin. Her research foci include incarceration, Indigeneity and intersectionality. Iida Käyhkö is an organiser with the Women’s Strike Assembly, and a solidarity activist with the Kurdish Freedom Movement. She is an archaeologist, anthropologist and security researcher working on a PhD exploring responses to criminalisation, and ideas of self-defence, in the Kurdish women’s movement in the UK. Johannes Lenhard is an ethnographer of venture capital and homelessness and currently the Centre Coordinator of the Max Planck Centre Cambridge for the Study of Ethics, the Economy and Social Change. Having worked towards a better understanding of survival practices of homeless people in London and Paris for his PhD, he has in 2017 started a new research project on the ethics of venture capital investors He is currently preparing the publication of his dissertation monograph as well as finalising a book on diversity and inclusion in VC and tech. His writing has appeared in academic peer-reviewed journals (e.g. City and Society, Housing Studies) as well as journalistic outlets, such as Techcrunch, Prospect, Sifted, Aeon, the Conversation and Crunchbase. Find his Twitter @ JFLenhard.

Junge Linke sind eine unabhängige Jugendorganisation, die junge Menschen in ganz Österreich für den Aufbau einer starken linken Kraft begeistert. Unter anderem arbeiten sie am Lernnetz - der kostenlosen Nachhilfe und geben den Podcast Kein Katzenjammer heraus. Carina Maier forscht und lehrt zu Kritischer Gesellschaftstheorie, Feministischer Ökonomie, Antifeminismus, Sorge und Abhängigkeit. Sie studierte Politikwissenschaft und Sozioökonomie in Wien und Bordeaux, aktuell lehrt sie am Fachbereich Politische Theorie, Universität Wien, und an der FH Campus Wien am Fachbereich Soziale Arbeit. Sie ist Mitglied des feministischen Theoriekollektivs fe.ory Eana Meng is a historian of medicine and a physician in training. She is currently a researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, and will be a MD-PhD candidate at Harvard Medical School and the Department of History of Science in the fall of 2021. Her research has traced the lesser-known histories of the use of acupuncture by American activists (including those in the Black revolutionary movement) since the 1970s and the legacies that emerge from them, which include a five-point ear acupuncture protocol currently used around the world for substance use and behavior health conditions. She is interested in the histories that sit at the intersection of radical politics of health, integrative/alternative healing modalities, community healthcare, the opioid crisis and pain, and crucial dimen-

sions of race, gender, and class. She runs a blog at ofpartandparcel.com. Find her Twitter @Eanam38. Cristina Morini is a journalist, essayist, and independent researcher. Her work deals with issues relating to gender and the processes of work transformation. She is a founding member of Bin-Italia (Basic Income Network Italia) and member of Effimera, a research network. Her publications notably include: “The feminization of labour in cognitive capitalism,” Feminist Review 87 (2007): 40-59; “Segmentation du travail cognitif et individualisation du salaire,” Multitudes 32 (2008): 65-76, co-authored with A. Fumagalli; “Life put to work: Toward a theory of life-value,” Ephemera 10 (2010): 234-52, co-authored with A. Fumagalli; “Social reproduction as a paradigm of the common: Reproduction antagonism, production crisis,” in Post-Crisis Perspectives: The Common and its Powers, ed. O. Augustin and C. Ydesen (Peter Lang, 2013), 83-98; “Anthropomorphic capital and Commonwealth value,” Frontiers in Sociology 5 (2020), coauthored with A. Fumagalli. Her book publications include La serva serve (DeriveApprodi, 2001); Per amore o per forza. Femminilizzazione del lavoro e biopolitiche del corpo (Ombre Corte, 2010); Lo sciopero delle donne. Lavoro, trasformazioni del capitale, lotte (Manifestolibri, 2019), co-edited with Alisa Del Re, Bruna Mora and Lorenza Perini. Forthcoming (Manifestolibri 2021) Vite lavorate. Corpi, valore, resistenze al disamore.

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Gala Nettelbladt is an interdisciplinary urban scholar, PhD candidate at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a Research Associate at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space. Her PhD project investigates the urban politics of farright contestations in planning and governance processes. She is part of the German editorial collective sub\urban. Zeitschrift für kritische Stadtforschung. Morrigan Nihil. If I didn’t write, I’d get full up. Historian and artist. Mother and carer. Wife of an excon. Fascinated by the obscenity of ‘Why?’ After a lifetime of looking for answers, I’m beginning to realise that it’s not about what I think I want to know, more about what I know I want to think. It’s a journey. I ride a motorbike. The open road is a good place to be. Johanna Reckewerth researches the spatial dimensions of gender equality with the aim to build the bridge between feminist theory & urban practice. She studies urbanism at the Bauhaus-University in Weimar and currently writes her thesis on local care networks in Weimar and the power of critical mapping techniques. Darius Reinhardt studiert im Master Politische Theorie in Frankfurt am Main und forscht neben Themen der kritischen Migrationswissenschaften, insbesondere zu Rechtspopulismus und Rechtsextremismus. Maria Reitano is an architect and PhD candidate in Urban Planning at the University of Naples Federico II (Italy), Department of Architecture (DiARC). Her interests include

urban political, new municipalism and open-source urbanism. Her research addresses the understanding of processes of self-organisation and emancipation in public space within the field of agonistic planning and aims to investigate possible transformative strategies deriving from practices of insurgent urbanism. She is currently collaborating in the European research project HERA Joint Research Program, “Public Spaces: Culture and Integration in Europe” (PUSH). Fernando Silva is a Chilean urban practitioner and researcher, specialised in urban informalities, disaster risk reduction in cities and participatory urban design. He works as an architect in informal communities. He holds a MSc. in Building and Urban Design in Development from the Bartlett’s Development Planning Unit (UCL) and he is a licensed architect from the University of Valparaíso (Chile). He has lived in Chile and the UK. Die Initiative Sommerpaket ist ein Zusammenschluss aus Basismitarbeiter:innen der Wiener Wohnungslosenhilfe. Sie setzt sich für ein Recht auf Wohnen ein und fordert im Speziellen ganzjährige Notquartiere für Obdachlose (in Wien) und bessere Arbeitsbedingungen für BetreuerInnen. Christin Stühlen lebt, lernt und arbeitet in Frankfurt am Main und Köln und beschäftigt sich theoretisch und praktisch mit Migrationsund Fluchtprozessen. Carlotta Trippa is an Italian urban practitioner and researcher, specialised and passionate about emoti-

onal geographies, feminist spatial design, participatory process, and urban practices at the intersection of care and resistance. She works as an architect/urban designer on public and community projects between Italy and the UK. She is also the co-founder and co-director of Projektado, a critical design collective currently focused on the production of a digital experimental magazine. She holds a MSc. in Building and Urban Design in Development from the Bartlett’s Development Planning Unit (UCL) and she is a licensed architect from the University of Ferrara (Italy). She has lived in Italy, France, Lebanon and the UK. Quito Tsui is a researcher at The Engine Room where she works on technology in the context of conflict and humanitarian organisations, and the development of a technological environment rooted in human rights. Her previous research includes thinking about transitional justice and memory.

Editorial Collective Alessio Kolioulis is an urban economist and cultural geographer working at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (University College London). He edits engagée and is part of the team behind Eterotopia France. Tweets @alessioilgreco. Felix Maschewski is a member of the PhD-net ‘Das Wissen der Literatur’ (HU Berlin/ Princeton University) and associated researcher at the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam). Apart from academic articles, he regularly writes essays for Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Die Republik, Philosophie Magazin, Wirtschaftswoche, Internazionale and Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Twitter: @fmaschewski

Lukas Stolz is a researcher, activist and cultural producer with a particular interest in creating critical, experimental, and humorous environments within and against existing institutions. He used to live with three lovely cats which he now misses very much. Rahel Süß is a political theorist researching data politics and the future of democracy at HumboldtUniversity (postdoc). Her most recent book Demokratie und Zukunft: Was auf dem Spielt steht has been published with Edition Konturen in 2020. Rahel is the Co-Director of the Data Politics Lab. Tweets @ RahelSuess.

Anna-Verena Nosthoff is a philosopher and a political theorist. She is co-director of the Data Politics Lab at HU Berlin and associated researcher at the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam). She also works as an essayist (for, a.o. FAS, Republik and Philosophie Magazin) and tweets @AnnaNosthoff. Valerie Scheibenpflug studied Philosophy, German and Psychology in Vienna, Nottingham and Heidelberg. After her studies, she worked as a teacher; currently she is holding a position as a university assistant (prae doc) at the Department of Political Science (Political Theory) in Vienna. Johannes Siegmund is a political theorist working on migration, racism, ecology and art. He lives, teaches and writes in Vienna and is part of the collective philosophy unbound. Also, he is an enthusiastic and stressed father.

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Impressum engagée #10 “Who Cares” 2021/2022 ISSN 2413-4279 engagée is an independent journal at the intersection of politics, philosophy and art. The project gives special importance to current political issues, publishing critical analyses and theoretically informed interventions. Publisher | association engagée, ZVR-Nr: 807011148 Shop | engagée is distributed via its online shop and www.patreon.com/engagee. Contact | www.engagee.org | info@engagee.org Editorial Collective | London, Berlin and Vienna | Alessio Kolioulis, Felix Maschewski, Anna-Verena Nosthoff, Valerie Scheibenpflug, Johannes Siegmund, Lukas Stolz, Rahel Süß. Project Coordination #10 | Alessio Kolioulis, Valerie Scheibenpflug, Johannes Siegmund, Lukas Stolz, Rahel Süß. Design | Rahel Süß Print | Sieprath, Aachen

Contributors | Niyousha Bastani, Jasmin Behrends, Camillo Boano, Amy Clark, Zuzanna Czebatul, Ida Danewid, Flannan Delaney, Emma Dowling, Manischa Eichwalder, Elizabeth Fetterolf, Eleri Fowler, Jule Govrin, Claudia Hitzeroth, Sonja John, Iida Käyhkö, Johannes Lenhard, Junge Linke, Carina Maier, Eana Meng, Cristina Morini, Gala Nettelbladt, Morrigan Nihil, Johanna Reckewerth, Darius Reinhardt, Maria Reitano, Fernando Silva, Initiative Sommerpaket, Christin Stühlen, Carlotta Trippa, Quito Tsui. A special thank you to Clemens Bellut, Sebastian Berg, Paula Blömers, Max Bohm, Justine Dorion, Katharina Hoppe, Eckardt Lindner, Luigi Ivaldi, Lars Kaiser, Zohreh Khoban, Luke Midworth, Manuela Ormea, Duco Roggenkamp, Katja Scheibenpflug, Elvira Süß, Demi Spriggs (ContestedEditing), Timo Schröder, Yeganeh Khoie, Frieder Vogelmann, Julia Weingartner, KY. Funders | StV/BaGru Soziologie, IG Philosophie, StV Publizistik der Universität Wien.

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